LISZT, Vol. 2 = Adelaide, S. 466; Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor, S. 463; Les Jeux d’eaux a la Villa d’Este, S. 163; Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude, S. 173, No. 3; Funerailles, S. 173, No. 4; Nuages Gris, S. 199; Vier kleine Klavierstuecke, S. 192: No. 2 in A-flat Major; Mephisto Waltz No. 1, S. 514 – Garrick Ohlsson, piano – Bridge 9409, 76:27 [Distr. by Albany] ****:
Recorded 23-25 July 2012, this second of Garrick Ohlsson’s excursions into Liszt seems a composite of diverse works by the Hungarian master, including transcriptions and original works that challenge player and listener while expanding the capabilities of the instrument. Ohlsson opens with two transcriptions by Liszt, the first of Beethoven’s extended song Adelaide, Op. 46 (1795) followed by Bach’s potent Fantasy and Fugue in G Minor, a kind of homage from one Weimar master to another. The Beethoven song marks the composer’s first important lied, an expansive outpouring of emotion as a man, wandering in a garden, equates his beloved with the bounties of Nature. Liszt manages to evoke the rustle of leaves, the song of nightingales, the very translucent movement of clouds and stars, all in verdant arioso and roulade figures. Eventually, a huge cadenza from Ohlsson evolves on his resonant Boesendorfer Imperial piano, capping off a series of stanzas rife with Rousseau’s analogies for love as a pantheistic ritual.
For the Bach piece (1712), Liszt captures the organ sonority in the Prelude as it can manifest itself in the modern piano, via doublings and thick chords by way of chromatic harmonies both dissonant and emotionally charged. A dark, stentorian power emanates from Ohlsson’s staccato chords, juxtaposed against lyrical parlando passages. The churning bass chords consistently add a potent weight to the proceedings. The succeeding Fugue galvanizes its independent lines into a mighty surge of ineluctable energy, the figures both dancing and depicting the presence of a spiritual colossus.
Liszt, the great composer of modern ecstasies, found a revelatory fascination in things material and spiritual. The 1877 Les Jeux d’eaux a la Villa d’Este, set in the Tivoli fountains, transposes St. John’s “waters of everlasting life” into a voluptuous sound that adumbrates much of Debussy and Ravel. Ohlsson imbues the piece with an athletic luster where Cziffra would accentuate its canny effervescence. Certainly Ohlsson’s upper registers breathe a loveliness and lithe elegance into the exquisite chant, played with a fine legato and strummed effects in the midst of shimmering sprays of color.
Liszt wrote the set of ten pieces for piano that make up his Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses between 1847 and 1852. Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude, the third piece of the set, has been praised as one of Liszt’s finest works for piano, and commentators hear in its luminous vast calm the same spirit that permeates the slow movements of Beethoven’s late quartets. A shimmering right hand underlines the left hand melody, the whole based upon a Lamartine sentiment of a serenity and peace from God that surpasses understanding. A grand eroticism infiltrates virtually every page from Ohlsson, especially its Andante middle section of tender contemplation, leading to the da capo, in which Liszt gathers all motives together. The massive Funerailles observes the death of Chopin (1849) and the tragic fate of Hungary after the 1848 Revolution. Taking Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise as his emotional model, Liszt weaves a grand tribute to the spirit of patriot ardor. The Canadian pianist and teacher Philip Thomson calls Funerailles, “Dark, poignant, defiant, and tragic, just as the events were that inspired it. More powerful or heartfelt funeral music than this has not been penned.” Ohlsson exerts a potent dolor upon this melancholy opus whose emotive power quite sweeps us away in a lament of blistering energy.
Nuages gris, composed in 1881, remains one of the best-known of Liszt’s late works. This somber, even disturbing study of “Gray Clouds,” quite free harmonically and bare emotionally, anticipates much of Debussy and Schoenberg at once, both of whom sought a similar freedom of tonality and expression: the pianist’s hands seem to inhabit different tonal worlds altogether. Ohlsson then provides us a rare miniature from Liszt, his second of Four Little Piano Pieces (c. 1864) dedicated to Baroness Olga von Meyendorff. The compressed masterwork might be a nocturne, but its shifts of color and agogics make it an etude of subtle character, ingeniously wending through harmonic labyrinths to settle in the A-flat it claims as a home key.
Liszt actually wrote four Mephisto Waltzes, but by far the best-known is the first, written for Carl Tausig — whom Liszt much admired, calling him “the infallible, with fingers of steel” — completed in 1861 as one of two episodes for orchestra based on Nikolaus Lenau’s lyric poem Faust. This “episode,” the Dance in the Village Inn, after Lenau, literally tunes Mephisto’s fiddle a la Paganini before Mephisto and Faust enter upon a series of suggestive and seductive engagements with the ladies at the inn. Ohlsson, here much in the tradition of Horowitz and Cziffra, exploits the driving bravura power of the writing, unabashedly enjoying its status as a pianistic tour de force.
—Gary Lemco
