Liszt: Opera transcriptions; Sonetti del Petrarca; Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (excerpts)

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COMPOSERS: Liszt
LABELS: Vox
WORKS: Opera transcriptions; Sonetti del Petrarca; Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (excerpts)
PERFORMER: Alfred Brendel (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: CDX 5l81 Reissue (1955-9)
In recent decades, Brendel has focused his attention on the Austro-German Classics, the sort of music which Schnabel said was better than could ever be performed. You might say that Liszt’s music is only as good as it is performed, and yet as a young man in the late Fifties Brendel made it something of a speciality. What he brings to it, apart from very strong fingers, is a compelling sense of continuity and rhetoric. These are very public, in-your-face performances, and even in the third Petrarch Sonnet, Brendel plays out boldly. Apparently he himself rates the extended Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude as one of the few things worth having done, though the piece is surely nothing deeper than a religiose Rustle of Spring, if considerably longer. Vox’s recordings were never exactly endearing, though the piano sound is perceptibly rich and brilliant, even if heard through a cloak of woolliness. Still, although the Tarantella and Petrarch Sonnets are well served on disc, there are so few recordings of the other repertoire here which can bear comparison with Brendel’s musicality, that the reissue seems well justified. Adrian Jack

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