FRANZ LISZT : Années de pèlerinage III (Leslie Howard) (1998) FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Liszt's late piano works are of a character not met elsewhere in the great music literature of the nineteenth century. The thinning out of the style, almost to the point of deliberate barrenness, and the simultaneous impression of avant-garde pioneering and the solitary reflection that comes with age is unique to Liszt. The uncompromising nature of much of this music led to its instant neglect, and, in many cases, its lack of publication until well into the twentieth century.
Other volumes in this series explore the late waltzes, three of the larger sets of pieces (Via Crucis, Christmas Tree and the Chorales) and the single character pieces of the last period of Liszt’s life, and still to come are some of the late transcriptions, the last Rhapsodies and the other late dances and marches. The present programme comprises the remaining sets of pieces (not cycles, however many times they may have been so described) and two other rarities from the 1880s.

Much criticism was raised against Liszt because, in many of his earlier works of an overtly Hungarian nature, he had not differentiated between gypsy café music or professionally composed music and Hungarian folksong. (It always strikes me as a colossal injustice that other composers of the time—such as Brahms in his Hungarian Dances—were never castigated in the slightest for afflicting serious butchery on folk material, and yet Liszt, who certainly treated his source material with love and wit, whatever its origins might have been, stood condemned.) Almost as a conscious act of atonement, it seems, Liszt arranged five ‘real’ Hungarian folksongs, even indicating repeats to correspond with the number of verses in the original poem, just as he did in his chorale arrangements, and, as there, these repeats are not germane to the musical structure and are not generally performed. He even included the texts, in the Hungarian which he could not himself read with any fluency, at the head of each of these charming miniatures. More notes of Leslie Howard