FRANZ LISZT : Waltzes (Leslie Howard) (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

Aside from juvenilia, a few album-leaves, early versions and works based upon other composers’ music, these works represent the complete original concert waltzes for piano by Liszt. The Ländler and Albumblatt are given by way of encores. The third of the Trois Valses-Caprices, S214, is based on themes by Donizetti (Leslie Howard has recorded it for Hyperion on ‘Rare Piano Encores’, CDH55109). The Bagatelle without tonality was originally to have been the Fourth Mephisto Waltz. The Petite Valse favorite is omitted since it is merely an earlier version of the Valse-Impromptu. Two recently-published additions to the Mephisto Waltz No 1 are included here. Liszt left three pages of sketches for an Andantino he wished to add to the Mephisto Waltz No 4. Leslie Howard completed the piece in 1978 for the Liszt-Bartók cycle at La Scala, Milan, and this version, which is dedicated to Alfred Brendel, is published by Basil Ramsey.
We are accustomed to look benignly upon the shortcomings of the great: if Johann Sebastian Bach should write such a clumsy fugue as the example in the B flat Capriccio we are amused rather than concerned at the, genius’s early struggles. But we are less charitable when confronted with achievement of less predictable quality; longueur, banality and technical error even in so great a man as Schubert have not been exempt from unsympathetic criticism. In Liszt’s case we have acquired, in the century since his death, a complete critical mythology which has successfully prevented the investigation and performance of many of his finest works. Anyone who is pushing back creative frontiers in a prodigious output and over a long life is bound to produce an uneven body of work where sometimes a sense of experiment outweighs one of achievement. Yet, despite the enormous quantity of the Liszt œuvre—well over a thousand pieces—there is remarkably little without interest. In order to comprehend and eventually pardon Liszt’s imperfections the critical mythology must be attacked. That Liszt was a powerful character and an influential man is beyond dispute. That younger composers from Smetana and Glazunov to Grieg and Macdowell and older contemporaries like Schumann, Berlioz and Wagner asked and received Liszt’s assistance is testimony to esteem for the man’s music as much as for his generosity. That Liszt propagated the works of other composers old and new by means of piano transcriptions or fantasies need offend no-one—the overtly audience-slaying nature of a number of these works is not, in any case, an essentially unpleasant phenomenon. That Liszt’s character was so multi-faceted as to reflect itself in an enormous range of styles is at once an advantage and a defect. But the present writer for one would rather have a hero who tried and didn’t always succeed than one who took the eternal safe option. It is essential to respect the sincerity of Liszt’s aims: the flatulent and intellectually pusillanimous epithets ‘Mephistopheles disguised as a priest’, ‘Virtuoso, Prophet, Charlatan’, ‘Thunder, Lightning, Mesmerism, Sex’ or ‘The Tragi-Comedy of a Soul divided against itself’ (Ernest Newman at his most miserable) are, at the most charitable, corrosive barnacles of half-truth and small help to the listener. The conflict between the spiritual and the material is as germane to art as it is to life, and if Liszt’s nobler aspirations are occasionally tainted with saccharine, or his worldlier offerings sometimes afflicted with a serious overdose of rhetoric, there seems no need to accuse him of posturing in order to explain his lapses from greatness.
More notes of Leslie Howard