Liszt's b-minor Piano Sonata

 

Few people will argue with me if I claim that Liszt's Sonata is one of the greatest pieces of piano music ever composed. Yes, I'd also put in a vote for Scriabin's Fifth Sonata and some of the other works I've written about on this blog, but this piece seems to have it all - beauty, excitement, temper, fantasy, power, mystery, enlightenment. How can that be?

By most accounts, Liszt was the greatest pianist ever. He was also quite a composer and champion of other composers' works - from Beethoven (whom he met as a child) to Wagner (his son-in-law). In his longest work for the piano he let out all the stops, and if you are going to perform it, you have to do the same. 

I've heard the Sonata many times in concert, each time it was memorable. For example, I'll never forget hearing the wonderful Elisabeth Leonskaja start it in Freiburg with those first mysterious notes and then, when she got to the octave jumps, she missed the mark. I was sitting close enough to notice the expression of humor and a bit of disappointment on her face. And yet she played on (of course!) and probably played that much more intensely because of the bang at the beginning.

Then there was the visiting professor from the St. Petersburg Conservatory who segued from the first repeat right into the finale, making a 10-minute jaunt out of a 30-minute summit ascension. I had been talking to the student sitting next to me beforehand, telling her how much I was looking forward to this piece in particular. When we both realized what had happened, we let out a breath and looked at each other in utter disbelief. Perhaps she realized she wasn't in good form and couldn't pull off the entire Sonata, or she simply blacked out.

In a particularly moving interpretation, Vitaly Margulis let his listeners know that what he said in his master classes was indeed true: "Some pianists can make the most passionate passage sound like falling bricks and others play the simplest scale and it comes across like a declaration of love." 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

Image
Recently a friend asked me which music piece IS ME. This is it. This song by Gustav Mahler is one I've long felt an affinity for. If I said I loved it, that would smack of self-love, wouldn't it? It has been close to me since I first heard it, probably around 1983. That is also when I discovered the incredible voice and personality of Maureen Forrester , who gave a song recital at our college in October 1983.  Maureen and I hit it off after her recital in 1983 After that fateful and wonderful meeting, I listened to all the recordings she had made which were readily available (and even ordered rare import copies of Canadian pressings). As so often happened with me, a person helped me discover a certain area of music. Having worked with Bruno Walter as a young woman, she became a renowned expert in the music of Gustav Mahler. But her repertoire spanned four centuries of music and dozens of languages. The afternoon before her recital, I had hosted the "Classical Hour" on
Read more

Alberto Ginastera's Variaciones Concertantes

Image
  If you look closely at the CD cover above, you'll see Ginastera down at the bottom in third place. Although the other two pieces are lovely and world premiere recordings to boot, my love goes out to the concert variations this time. I was thrilled when my mother sent me this recording right after I moved to Germany in 1990. George Manahan and I had a friendly relationship while I lived in Richmond. We had dinner together and I went to very many of his orchestra rehearsals. We often talked about music together and I would lend him books about Mahler that he hadn't read yet. In one case, while he was rehearsing Mahler 5, he stopped during the Adagietto, turned around and asked ME what I thought about the balance between the harps and the orchestra, even though his assistant conductor was sitting up in the balcony. I was sitting down below with two of my best friends, my girlfriend and her parents. I felt like a king.  I never got to hear him conduct Ginastera, though. I believ
Read more

Schumann's Piano Concerto

Image
  Martha Argerich plays the Schumann Piano Concerto in Amsterdam Most of Robert Schumann's music puzzles me. Perhaps because he was insane; or maybe I'm crazy. Or perhaps it is because he composed his music to go straight to the heart and my head often gets in the way of this kind of listening. Whatever it is, I am often at a loss as to what the music is trying to say. His Kinderszenen are easy enough to appreciate, but I've read few critics who have praised either his concerto for violin or the cello concerto. The Piano Concerto in a-minor , on the other hand, is one of the most frequently played and most lovely piano concerti in the concert repertoire. It is often called a woman's concerto, perhaps because the half-hour long work is not as strenuous to play as some of the other piano concerti in the repertoire.  My first introduction to the piece came at William & Mary when the first movement was to be played by a student pianist, Steven Budd, who had won that yea
Read more