Richter Plays Liszt: Live From 1958-61
Label: WHRA Catalog: WHRA6043 Format: CD Liebesträume, nos. 2 (S.541/2) & 3 (S.541/3); Valses Oubliées no. 1 in F sharp, (S.215/1); no. 2 in A flat, (S.215/2); no. 3 (S.215/3); Mephisto Waltz no. 1 (S.110/2) (all above live, 5 Feb. 1958, Moscow); Fantasy on Hungarian Folk Melodies (S.123) & Concerto for Piano no. 2 in A, (S.125) (both with János Ferencsik cond. Hungarian State Orch., live, 27 Sept 1961, Budapest); Harmonies poétiqureligieuses (S.173/7) “Funérailles” (live, 11 Feb. 1958, Budapest). AAD; Audio restoration: Kit Higginson (2012); notes: Kevin Bazzana. Total time: 79:47. Richter’s Liszt repertoire was characteristically selective. It included works both major and minor, difficult and simple, profound masterpieces as well as crowd-pleasers, programmatic as well as “absolute” music. He focused on music from Liszt’s maturity, only occasionally dipping into the showpieces of Liszt’s youth or the strange experiments of his old age, and he mostly avoided Liszt’s arrangements. Still, Richter was one of the twentieth century’s important Liszt interpreters, deeply committed to those Liszt works he did play. His Liszt was bold, potent, epic in scale, but also, where appropriate, probing, introspective, even haunting. Listening to the concert performances from 1958 released here, one hears tenderness, delicacy, and great lyric power in the two Liebesträume; wit and bite, as well as immaculate fingerwork and a wide, occasionally impressionistic tonal palette, in the Valses oubliées; real ferocity and sometimes frantic drive, as well as considerable mystery, in the Mephisto Waltz No. 1. Of the opening of Funérailles, the Liszt biographer Alan Walker wrote, “The player who lacks the courage to keep the pedal down may produce a ‘cleaner’ sound, but he will lose the noise and clangor of funeral bells which build up to a deafening roar. If he loses that, he loses the piece.” Not surprisingly, Richter, in the monumental, powerfully expressive account released here, does not “lose the piece”: he never lacked that particular kind of courage, for it was not in his nature to compromise interpretively. Price: $25.98 |