Comparison recordings:
Polonaises (2), Peter Katin. Olympia
OCD 199
Polonaise #2, György Cziffra. Philips
LP
"Au bord d’une source" from
Années de Pèlerinage,
Lazar Berman DGG
Ballade #2, Vladimir Horowitz. RCA 5935-2
RC
Ballade #2, Ervin Nyiregházi.
Telefunken LP AW 6.42626
When I was twelve years
old everybody knew who Franz Liszt was:
he wrote the piano piece "Liebestraum,"
the "Hungarian Rhapsody"
and Les Préludes. Regarding
the last, I remember wondering what
that "S.P.3" in very fine
print on the record album cover meant.
During his lifetime,
Liszt was widely acknowledged, even
by Eduard Hanslick, as the greatest
pianist who had ever lived, but what
Liszt wanted was to be remembered as
a great composer. For most of his life
and for a long time thereafter, his
enemies were able to deny him this.
Even before his death his compositions
had virtually disappeared from the concert
stage. He was considered to be a former
pianist, now a teacher, but, beyond
that, "merely" an arranger
of existing music for his "use"
as a virtuoso performer. However superficial,
his piano music was considered by some
to be morally corrupting and kept from
the attention of piano students below
the age of consent.
It wasn’t until the
1930s, fifty years after his death,
that things began to change for Liszt,
and not until the present day — over
a hundred years after his death — that
his surviving compositions were collected
and edited into comprehensive scholarly
editions. So not only is Liszt now properly
honoured as a composer of great skill,
the innovator behind Wagner’s boldest
harmonic and textural explorations,
the shape of this honouring emulates
the honours accorded to another of Liszt’s
idols, Bach (also a great arranger of
other men’s music), in the gap of 100
years after his death before the publication
of a comprehensive edition. The Searle
catalogue lists nearly 800 works by
Liszt in all genres.
To play the music of
Liszt effectively a pianist must be
the equal of the greatest pianist in
the world ca 1850, must understand the
personality of one of the musicians
who created our very idea of Romantic
music, must have in his or her personality
a streak of adolescent showmanship which
delights in astounding the audience,
alternating with a profoundly pious
spirituality and sense of the mysterious.
His or her sense of good taste must
be tempered by a deeply affecting sentimentality.
Finding all these qualities in one person
is almost impossible, but we are fortunate
because many modern pianists can assemble
all these characteristics on occasion,
now and then, and if these moments coincide
with time in a recording studio, the
results are sublime. Over the years
we can assemble performances of Liszt
which fully reveal the master’s vision.
But the chance of a single pianist attaining
this parnassus of accomplishment more
than one or two times in a lifetime
is negligible. Horowitz achieved it
twice, maybe even three times, Nyiregházi
once, maybe twice. The odds against
a single pianist playing all of Liszt’s
music at this high level are virtually
infinite. Even Liszt himself probably
couldn’t do it.
Nevertheless, very
good Liszt playing is more common now
than it was fifty years ago. We are
all aware of the great recorded series
of the complete piano music of Liszt
by pianist Leslie Howard, a series remarkable
for consistent quality (so I am advised;
I haven’t been able to hear more than
a tiny fraction of it myself) and amazing
in the scope of the works presented,
and revelatory in the many works made
available to listeners for the first
time.
The 2002 Sixth International
Liszt Piano competition in Utrecht awarded
an unusual first prize: among other
awards, the winner was to record the
complete piano works of Liszt for Naxos
records. The current disk is volume
22, the first in this series I have
heard, and deals with some less well
known works. However, if this is scraping
the bottom of the barrel, the barrel
was once filled with 24 carat gold!
Of the two Polonaises, Searle
223, it is the second in E which is
the better known. György Cziffra’s
recording for Philips is of a legendary
performance, one of those recordings
a great virtuoso achieves perhaps only
once in a lifetime. Jean Dubé,
an intense young man whose leaflet portrait
shows him displaying what must be the
largest and strongest hands of any human
being on earth, does not equal Cziffra
in this work, let alone surpass him.
However Dubé’s performance of
the less often heard first Polonaise
in c "mélancolique"
is brilliant, revelatory, and satisfying,
if not quite the equal in either drama
or subtlety of Peter Katin’s 1988 performance
on Olympia. This work is less flamboyant,
more symphonic in character, more reflective
in mood as the subtitle suggests. This
is first rank Liszt playing — not legendary,
but first rank.
With the two Ballades,
the temperature goes up somewhat, particularly
with the second in b, S 171, where the
competition is vicious. Dubé
does not surpass either Horowitz or
Nyiregyházi but is not terribly
far away and may bring the music a little
closer to us in feeling, if not in the
brilliance of the fireworks. In the
Horowitz recording, at some moments
time appears to be totally suspended,
at others one is afraid the piano will
explode. Nyiregházi’s low register
passage work was so menacing it scared
my dog.
This Au bord d’une
source S156/2b is the earlier version
of the one eventually published as part
of the collection Années de
Pèlerinage. Liszt’s earlier
versions are sometimes actually more
complex than the later published version.
After all, Liszt wanted to sell his
published music and writing music nobody
but him could play was not economically
feasible, so he sometimes revised his
works for publication making them easier
to play and less complicated. Between
Howard and Dubé we are privileged
to be able to compare and evaluate this
progression between early and late versions.
Not having scores of both versions,
I tried following this early version
on the disk with the score of the later
version and could see no obvious differences
in the overall organisation of the work
except in the final cadential chord
which is more elaborated in this earlier
version. Other differences may likely
lie in detailed textures or fleeting
harmonies.
It is in the final
three pieces on this disk that the temperature
approaches the lightning range. I have
never heard these pieces before; they
are not mere arrangements, but variations/fantasias
composed by Liszt upon simple tunes
by Huber and Knop. Many of Liszt’s finest
works are in this fantasia-variations
form, and these works, while they will
never displace the Don Juan Fantasy
in popularity, display the same skill.
Whether we will ever hear them played
any better is doubtful, and hardly necessary.
I can see I need to hear some of the
other disks in this series.
Paul Shoemaker
see also review
by Colin Clarke
Jean Dubé, piano 
