FRANZ LISZT : The Late Pieces (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Liszt's third period' may be said to begin with his departure from Weimar, and especially with his retirement to Rome in the middle 1860s. From this point to the end of his life his music contains a great deal of introspection and almost a disregard of the likely fate of many of the works, only a few of which were performed and published in his lifetime. Orchestral works are rare, and the choral works after the completion of Christus tend to be on a small scale without orchestral accompaniment. The songs and piano pieces become starker, and the textures become leaner, even in the few ‘public’ pieces like the later Mephisto Waltzes and Rhapsodies. Leaving aside the late dances, the religious pieces and the great collections (the third Année de pèlerinage, the Christmas Tree suite and the Historical Hungarian Portraits), the present recording brings together all of the late character pieces for piano, as well as the piano versions of late works which also exist in other forms.
This is an altogether astounding body of work from an indefatigable imagination, in its way comparable to the late Beethoven Quartets or Bach’s Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue. The psychiatrist Anthony Storr, in his book The School of Genius, writes: ‘The old often show less interest in interpersonal relationships, are more content to be alone, and become more preoccupied with their own, internal concerns … this change … can be most clearly seen in the productions of those who have left behind a series of works of abiding interest.’ Storr rightly defines the first period of an artist’s life as a training time, the second as the advent of mastery and individuality, often combined with a need for a wide public, and the third as ‘a time when communication with others tends to be replaced by works depending more upon solitary meditation’.
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