LISZT: Annees de Pelerinage: Trios Annees; Venezia e Napoli, S. 162 – Louis Lortie, piano – Chandos CHAN 10662, (2 CDs) 80:15; 81:05 [Distr. By Naxos] ****:
Liszt’s bicentennial finds a devotee in French-Canadian pianist Louis Lortie, who here (8-10 November 2010) traverses Liszt’s three books comprising The Years of Pilgrimage: 1835-1836; 1839-1846; and 1867-1877. While the first two volumes explore alternately virtuosic and poetical subjects, the last takes an experimental turn, combining Liszt’s fascination with post-Wagnerian harmony and his penchant for aspects of religious devotion. The forty years involved in having amassed this potent repertory and rhetorical vocabulary in music demonstrates Liszt’s own magnificent growth spiritually and digitally. Lortie himself provides technical firepower to spare, although the application of his percussive force occasionally waxes de trop. The general effect, however, remains vital and grandly sympathetic, even at times inspired.
The “Swiss” Year (pub. 1842) opens with the Chapel of William Tell, a declamatory piece in C Major built of block chords, tremolos, and chorale motifs, the first of many opera that celebrate “landscapes and places consecrated by history and poetry.” The motto “One for all” appears on the title page and could have been penned by A. Dumas. Au lac de Wallenstadt depicts the motions of a Swiss lake, the piece prefaced by a quote from Byron’s “Childe Harold.” Byron admonishes that we “forsake Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring,” and Liszt’s music ultimately confers in music Saint John’s “waters of life,” a conceit we hear again in the D Major section of Les Jeux deux a la Villa d’Este. Flowery Alpine melodies in G Major define the tiny Pastorale. Au bord d’une source takes its liquid inspiration from Schiller, the right hand in suspended motions over the left hand’s arpeggios, then the hands crossed as the play of water becomes ecstatic. If the first four pieces had already been conceived prior to the First Annee, the fiery Orage (1855) came to define the demonic in Liszt’s assembly of etudes in octaves, a depiction of a mountain storm–via Byron’s “Childe Harold”–that too might have inspired Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” Lortie loves this elemental composition, a pianistic urge towards Prometheus Unbound.
Liszt had a fondness for the novel Obermann by Etienne Pivert de Senancourt, a clone of Byron’s Manfred who suffers “unconquerable longings” and becomes a “subject to [the world’s] voluptuous illusion.” Through-composed, the monumental Valle d’Obermann subjects the opening motif to a series of transformations that culminate in a spiritual victory in the major mode. Lortie clearly has his element, and he often invokes the power and drama of the B Minor Sonata in this reading. The Eclogue takes its title from Virgil, but Liszt quotes Byron once more, utilizing a Swiss shepherd’s song–a plaint close to Debussy’s Girl with the Flaxen Hair--in relatively simple figures after the thunderous interior landscape of Obermann. Le mal du pays has its equivalent in Grieg’s “Heimweh,” a feeling of homesickness. Its angular melodic content points to modern harmony, but the affect eventually yields to a tender Adagio dolente section that Lortie finds beguiling. The wonderful nocturne, The Bells of Geneva, prefigure Ravel and bear a quote from “Childe Harold” of one’s absorption into Nature via competing registers in the keyboard. The dominant affect, however, despite the fluid motion, remains one of spiritual stillness and peace of mind, a rare commodity in such a Faustian sensibility as that of Liszt.
The Italian Year begins with the E Major Sposalizio after the painting The Marriage of the Virgin by Raphael. The cascading scales seem to have inspired Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1. Less concerned with landscape than with Italian art, Liszt will find inspiration in Michelangelo, Petrarch, Bononcini, and Dante, culminating in the mighty sonata based on the Victor Hugo poem “Apres une lecture du Dante.” Liszt quotes Michelangelo in his Il Penseroso study: “so long as injustice and shame remain on earth,” I am “thankful to be made of stone,” the latter words’ spirit echoed by Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa takes a simple tune and harmonizes it most affectionately. Of the Three Petrarch Sonnets (1838; rev. 1850) No. 104 has achieved a cult status for erotic expression, along with pieces like Un Sospiro and the D-flat Consolation. But no less intoxicating are the Sonnet 47 and Sonnet 123, and each receives from Lortie its due exalted passion. The Dante Sonata permits Lortie ecstatic excursions blissful and damned, the former in the empyrean F-sharp Major Liszt favors for heavenly rapture and no less important to Mahler for his Tenth Symphony. That Lortie equally relishes aspects of Inferno proves obvious from outset–the tritone announcement of the ‘interval diabolus’–and the intensity of his tremolos and huge octaves. The last pages complement the Magnificat section of the Dante Symphony, although the bass chords remind us of the depths of human despair through which Dante had to pass to find a vision of salvation.
”Angelus! Prayer to the Guardian Angels” (1877) opens the Third Book of Pilgrimages with the bell sounds in step-wise motion–Andante pietoso–Liszt had heard in Rome. Already Liszt employs modal harmonies that indicate his forward-looking sensibilities. Cypress trees bear a long tradition in Christian symbolism, and those in the gardens of the Villa d’Este boast their great size. Liszt calls his two cypress meditations “Threnodies” in darkly morose colors. Only the second–of a more martial cast than the first–enjoys some respite in its middle section. Les Jeux deux a la Villa d’Este fully occupies the mainstream repertory, a water piece requiring a number of toccata applications and adjustments of fine dynamics that indicate Liszt’s sensuously religious yearnings. Virgil supplies the textual allusion for the lament Sunt lacrymae rerum (1872), the Aeneid’s finding “the sense of tears in mortal things.” Liszt adds the epithet “En mode hongroise” in order to celebrate not the fall of Troy but the Hungarian War of Independence, 1848-1849. A sad Hungarian march in bass tones, the piece is dedicated to conductor Hans von Bulow, at one time Liszt’s son-in-law. More descents into the lugubrious follow with the “Marche funebre. En memoire de Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico. 19 Juin 1867.” The ill-fated Maximilian–who fell at the hands of Juarez – wins Liszt’s sympathy, much as Brian Aherne made Maximilian a man of honor in the film portrait. Marked “Tranquillo grandioso,” the piece has Lortie execute some disturbing harmonies in the course of its bitter “triumph.” Sursum corda can mean “Lift up your hearts,” and this 1877 piece takes the Preface to the Mass as its cue for a series of obsessive riffs keyed on a pedal E rife with harmonic clashes and angular tension.
Liszt added as a supplement (1859) to his Years of Pilgrimage Second Year the 1840 three (paraphrased) pieces published as Venezia e Napoli: Gondoliera, Canzone, and Tarantella. The opening piece transcribes a song by Peruchini, making it a touch-piece whose trills and water colors sing in runs amplified over repetitions of the basic tune. The Canzone takes its content from Rossini’s Otello, the aria “Nessun maggior dolore.” The left hand etches the theme in granite over a rolling ostinato, then the upper registers repeat the pattern even as the bass chords deepen. The wicked Tarantella comes from a theme by Correau but easily transcends that composer’s technical means with a series of bravura gestures in Neapolitan style whose last Prestissimo section assures anyone–like Lortie–who can play it accurately and convincingly an immediate renown.
–Gary Lemco
