Volume 1 of Jeno Jando’s complete set of the Hungarian Rhapsodies (Vol. 12 in Naxos’s ongoing cycle of Liszt’s piano music) reminds us that if the Rhapsodies are of mixed rather than pure provenance, disparaged by reactionaries (‘musicians of taste and discernment were not slow to perceive the hasty workmanship, the shallowness, the expensive glare which mar the Rhapsodies’ – Edward Sackville-West’s and Desmond Shawe-Taylor’s The Record Guide), they were praised by such radical thinkers as Bartok and Stravinsky. Among pianists, Alfred Brendel, a tireless champion of their flamboyant and elusive idiom, sees them as being in urgent need of protection from ‘serious’ musicians and piano maniacs alike. Jando ploughs an energetic middle course between such extremes. He has a good time and is not too well-behaved, in the Second Rhapsody finding room for an extra interpolation in the opening lassu, though offering a briefly skipping cadenza ad libitum in the friss (a far cry from, say, Marc-Andre Hamelin’s wondrous confection at the same point). There is an authentic sense of Lisztian thunder (tre corde pesante) in No. 3 and, more generally, everything is ship-shape and in place; no mean feat where the tangles and intricacies of the Rhapsodies are concerned. But how I longed for a higher degree of engagement, a firmer commitment to the Fifth Rhapsody’s heroic and elegiac measures or to its late-blossoming dolce con intimo sentimento. No. 6 gets off to a stilted start and overall there are too many reminders that mechanical proficiency hardly equals multi-faceted technique and pianistic skill. Too seldom is Jando’s macho swagger complemented by other more subtle and scintillating virtues.
The recordings are tight and airless and even at a bargain price there is no comparison with Edith Farnadi’s evocative, if technically fallible, Westminster set (long ripe for reissue) or Cziffra’s sky-rocketing if inflated bravura on EMI.'