At first you may wonder how Liszt’s works for piano and orchestra manage to fill four discs. But the pieces, familiar and unfamiliar, soon add up: as well as the concertos and Totentanz there are of course arrangements (Hexameron, Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, Weber’s Polonaise brillante and Konzertstuck, the latter with Liszt’s version of the solo part) and large-scale works that are almost never heard in concert (De profundis at 36 minutes, Grande fantaisie symphonique on Berlioz’s Lelio at 30 minutes). As Leslie Howard outlines in his excellent notes, Liszt’s surviving output for piano and orchestra comprises 16 pieces (if one includes the earlier version of Totentanz), although he almost certainly wrote or arranged more. The musical worth is, as with other areas of Liszt’s work, uneven, but this comprehensive package, including seven first recordings of newly prepared editions, will appeal to avid Lisztians.
I would, however, sound a note or two of caution. First, the recordings seem oddly out of focus in some pieces, with slightly recessed strings but booming tutti fortes, and the piano’s perspective within the sonic image also varies considerably. Second, and more importantly, Howard’s playing is too often lacklustre, predictable, dull … call it what you will. On one level it is hard to be too critical of a pianist who trawls his way through so many reams of treacherous music, one who has such an indefatigable enthusiasm for his subject. After all, Howard has contributed significantly to Liszt research, notably by preparing performing editions from manuscript sources of numerous unfinished and unpublished works. But on another level, his technical and imaginative limitations as a pianist (and it is as a pianist, not as a scholar, that he asks to be judged, otherwise someone else would have made the discs) are glaringly apparent when placed alongside any great Liszt performers.
This is most easily illustrated by the well-known works: listen to Krystian Zimerman’s wonderful DG recording of the concertos and you leap to an altogether higher plane of piano playing and music-making. The opening cadenza of the First Concerto, for example, is laboured and uneven in Howard’s hands, and the characterization of the more animated sections (try the first movement from 3'25'') is generally sluggish. Zimerman’s sharper reflexes and more acute sense of poetic imagination are of a different order.
But I can’t imagine many people will buy these discs for the concertos; it is the remaining works, the all-inclusive presentation of less readily available music, that will tempt collectors. Here, of course, the competition is thinner or non-existent, and it is correspondingly more difficult to gauge Howard’s success. Michel Beroff has recorded many of them on an excellent two-disc EMI set, and in pieces such as Malediction and the Fantasia on Hungarian Folk Themes he is bolder, more incisive and colourful, and has much stronger orchestral support (the ensemble on Howard’s set often leaves a lot to be desired). Of the remaining works, De profundis and the Concerto pathetique are major compositions with interesting histories of gestation (clearly elucidated in Howard’s notes), but their material does not, it seems to me, fully sustain their length. Howard is most convincing in the first, considerably different, version of Totentanz (for which, incidentally, he uses Busoni’s edition, since the private owner of the manuscript refused him permission to view it), and he adroitly negotiates the current versions of the Grand solo de concert and Hexameron. Liszt’s version of Weber’s Konzertstuck, however, is more of an edition than a transcription, and the alterations are concerned primarily with pianistic layout and figuration. Still, Howard needs little invitation to record yet more material; indeed, Sophie Menter’s Ungarische Zigeunerweisen is included as a ‘bonus’, on account of Liszt’s possible involvement somewhere along the line, before Tchaikovsky’s expert orchestration.
To sum up, if you want Liszt’s surviving concertante works in full then Howard is your man. But don’t expect inspired playing or revelatory musicianship. For most collectors edited highlights will be enough, particularly when one has more choice about who plays them.TP