Volume 5 of Naxos’s survey of Liszt’s piano music offers an introductory selection of his masterly transcriptions of Schubert songs. These works show Liszt at his most subtly imaginative and resourceful, compensating for the lack of text with a range of evocative and dynamically evolving accompanying textures.
Oxana Yablonskaya has a fine feeling for pianistic texture, for differentiating accompanimental and melodic strands. As with so much of Schubert’s original piano music, the melodic line must sing (the vocal source is, after all, central to these works). Here, Yablonskaya does not quite succeed. The vocal lines don’t really speak with a radiant luminous quality, although the thin and almost clangorous recorded sound doesn’t help the pianist’s cause.
Despite the drawback of the sound quality, many of the songs succeed brilliantly. Yablonskaya’s responses are deeply thoughtful and serious, her approach touchingly sensitive. Der Muller und der Bach, for example, is beautifully coloured and voiced, and Der Wanderer, taken at a broad tempo, builds an impressive dramatic tension. However, Horch, horch, die Lerch does not really sparkle, and occasionally Yablonskaya’s agogic hesitations (particularly in Auf dem Wasser zu singen and Aufenthalt) disrupt the natural melodic flow and become slightly irritating on repeated hearing. Although some songs are more successful than others, this is a good introduction to these transcriptions. Even better is Jorge Bolet’s wonderful equivalent disc (for me the highlight of his Liszt series for Decca); excellently recorded and played with dignity, grandeur, poetry and a glowing vocal line, he has all the ingredients for this music.
Naxos’s complete Liszt series is beginning to take shape, and a few preliminary general conclusions can be drawn. It places itself in direct competition with Leslie Howard’s monumental survey for Hyperion, and for my money, on the evidence so far, Naxos’s enterprise is the more attractive, not only because of the price. The advantage of employing more than one pianist is that, in theory, the results should be less routine, with each musician truly identifying with what they are playing. One may lose out on breadth and unity of conception, but Howard, in any case, is not an especially visionary pianist. Two things niggle me concerning the future of Naxos’s series. First, they need to improve the quality of their sound. Second, I hope they match the intelligent planning of Howard and Hyperion; a general selection of Schubert-Liszt songs is fine if carefully selected, but presumably we can’t now have Schwanengesang, or the 12 songs that Liszt transcribed from Winterreise, as integral sets.'