Beethoven/Liszt: Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica’ & Mozart/Alkan: Piano Concerto No. 20 (BIS)
★★★☆☆/★★★★☆
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Franz Liszt did extra to unfold music appreciation than your complete training equipment of his time. Listening to a bit he admired, Liszt would make a piano transcription. He bought most applause for brand spanking new Italian arias by Bellini and Donizetti, however Liszt all the time had missionary zeal, so he launched full symphonies by Beethoven to small cities the place no skilled orchestra ever performed.
His rating of Beethoven’s Eroica is directly inspiring and bemusing, a trustworthy illustration of Beethoven’s themes with out the subtleties of texture. Not many pianists convey it off with out the listener feeling short-changed.
Paul Wee, a London lawyer with phenomenal keyboard method, provides the Liszt/Beethoven Eroica rating his all, and that could be a little bit an excessive amount of. He performs quick and loud within the opening motion, reaching impression with out a lot penetration, propulsion with out that indefinable Schwung {that a} master-conductor brings to the rating. Emotion kicks in by the funeral march, however the account as an entire lacks irresistible coherence.
The album is redeemed by a transcendent studying of a solo transcription of Mozart’s twentieth piano concerto in D minor, K466, by the eccentric Parisian pianist-composer Charles-Valentin Alkan. It’s, after all, a lot simpler to simulate a small Mozart orchestra on solo piano than to undertaking considered one of Beethoven’s huge bangers, however Alkan does it with such finesse — and Wee performs with such empathy — that you might hardly think about a greater efficiency of the concerto with full orchestra. Alkan, with simply two fingers, in some way differentiates the piano line from the orchestral accompaniment, and Wee retains the dialog going with unerring conviction.
Make Mozart nice once more? Alkan does, in a lot the identical method as Liszt did. The ultimate pages of the Allegro take off like a flight of herons, lifting the center and all inside it.
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Norman Lebrecht is without doubt one of the most widely-read commentators on music, tradition and cultural politics. He’s an everyday presenter on BBC Radio 3 and a contributor to the Wall Road Journal, Bloomberg, Standpoint, Sinfini and different publications. His weblog, Slipped Disc, is among the many most generally learn cultural websites on-line, breaking unique tales and campaigning in opposition to human abuse and acts of injustice within the cultural industries.
