FRANZ LISZT : Liszt at the Theatre (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Whilst Liszt’s piano music derived from music for plays is a much smaller body of work than his catalogue of operatic pieces, the approach in his methods of composition, elaboration and transcription remains broadly the same. As far as present Liszt scholarship permits one ever to be categorical, this recording contains all of Liszt’s works in this genre.
The quite extensive scores for the theatre commonly written in the nineteenth century eventually overpowered both the plays they accompanied and the time limit for an audience’s concentration. Today few would relish an uncut performance of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt given with the entire Grieg score if they knew beforehand that the evening would take at least one hour longer than Götterdämmerung, and it has been only rarely that Mendelssohn’s Shakespearean efforts have been produced in tandem with the complete play. But much incidental music—which can take the form of overture, dances, songs, intermezzos or entr’actes, choruses or melodramas, as well as shorter flourishes and fanfares, entrance and exit fragments—has always had an independent life in the concert hall, and for Liszt, to whom the propagation of all kinds of music was a sacred duty, selected several works for re-working as recital pieces.

For some reason the piano transcription of the ever-popular Turkish March from The Ruins of Athens disappeared from view, to be replaced in pianists’ affections by the well-known transcription by Anton Rubinstein. Liszt’s version—every bit as interesting—is one of his rarest works. The identical pages stand at the head of the score of Capriccio alla turca, a much more extensive piece in Liszt’s virtuoso manner, in which the March (No 4 in Beethoven’s score) is succeeded by the Dervishes’ Chorus (No 3 in Beethoven’s score; also, at one time, known in a piano transcription by Saint-Saëns) in a section marked Andante fantastico, full of diabolical trills. Eventually the March returns, much transformed, and both themes are used to produce a triumphant coda. Possibly because of its difficulty, the Capriccio gave way to Liszt’s last work on the same material, the Fantasie, which started life as a work for piano and orchestra but which was substantially revised and reissued together with versions for solo piano, piano duet, and two pianos. The Fantasie begins with a transcription of the orchestral part of the March and Chorus (which form Beethoven’s No 6, and which Beethoven reissued as opus 124 with minor changes for the music to Die Weihe des Hauses—‘The Consecration of the House’) which breaks out with a cadenza in octaves into a much more fantastic working of the material, which then subsides into the Dervishes’ Chorus. From this point, there are many resemblances to the Capriccio but the atmosphere is rather more controlled and the fireworks held in abeyance until the coda. There, closing passages of the March and Chorus lead into a final peroration upon the other two themes.
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