In old age, as Kenneth Hamilton relates in the informative and entertaining notes accompanying his latest piano recording, Franz Liszt was in the habit of advising his pupils that they might not have much success in playing his own music but that he did have “some modest ability” as a transcriber. The subsequent one and a half centuries have largely corrected that mistrust of one of 19th-century romanticism’s towering originals, and nowadays it is Liszt’s vast array of transcriptions and paraphrases, perhaps, that is undervalued. Having tackled a selection of original works in the first instalment of his Liszt series, Hamilton now turns his attention to some of those reworkings.
The title of the collection, Salon and Stage, indicates the sources of his selection. There are transcriptions of songs by Schubert, Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann alongside more substantial works derived from opera. The best known piece here is probably Liszt’s paraphrase on Verdi’s Rigoletto – the Aida and Ernani paraphrases are included too – while the discs begin with the most spectacular of all these arrangements, the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser, which Hamilton plays with tremendous verve and intensity, every strand of the piano textures crystal-clear. For good measure he follows it with Song to the Evening Star from the same opera, complete with Liszt’s own coda. There’s more Wagner later on, with the deliciously decorated version of Am Stillen Herd from Die Meistersinger, and a witty, tricksy Spinning Song from Der Fliegende Holländer, glitteringly dispatched.
Hamilton lavishes as much care and technical brilliance on the smaller, more intimate pieces, such as Leise Flehen Meine Lieder from Schubert’s Schwanengesang, to which Liszt adds his own coda, as he does the spectacular, larger-scale ones. The rather coarse-grained treatment of the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin won’t be to all tastes, but Hamilton’s performance is so winning that almost all is forgiven; his ability to combine pianistic flair and technical brilliance with an acute understanding of how this music came into existence makes these performances very special indeed.
This week’s other pick
Though he is best known in his native Germany as a specialist in Beethoven’s piano music, Michael Korstick’s interests range far wider. His discs, more than 60 of them, haven’t received much attention in the UK, but the Liszt recordings he made between 1997 and 2010 have now been bundled together in a specially priced three-disc set from CPO. They consist of a performance of the B minor sonata (the earliest of the recordings) and the complete Années de Pèlerinage, including Venezia e Napoli, the supplement to the second, Italian volume. There is no doubting Korstick’s technical credentials in this music, but there are times when the results seem a little austere, lacking the affection for the music that is such a feature of Hamilton’s performances.
