Liszt: Sonata in B minor / Busoni: Elegies

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David Wilde DCD34030

Franz Liszt Sonata in B Minor Ferruccio Busoni Elegies

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David Wilde on Delphian

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) Sonata in B Minor Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) Elegies

Wilde Plays Chopin at the Wigmore Hall David Wilde piano DCD34010

David Wilde piano

In this exciting live recording, David Wilde presents a view of the vast emotional range of Chopin’s music. Passionate, tender, challenging, consoling, from the Sonata in B Minor Op 58 to the Polonaise-Fantasie Op 61, Chopin is revealed as a universal man and musician.

Ferruccio Busoni Elegies 1. Nach der Wendlung. Recuillement

[5:43]

2. All’Italia. In modo napoletano

[7:37]

3. Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu Dir. Choralvorspiel

[10:08]

4. Turandots Frauengemach. Intermezzo

[3:52]

5. Die Nachtlichen. Walzer

[3:15]

6. Erscheinung. Notturno

[7:38]

7. Berceuse

[5:17]

Franz Liszt 8. Sonata in B Minor

[34:10]

Total playing time

[77:42]

Recorded on 14, 15 & 16 June 2005 in the Reid Concert Hall, University of Edinburgh.

Producer: Paul Baxter 24-Bit digital editing and mastering: Paul Baxter

Design: John Christ Photography © Delphian Records Ltd Photograph editing: Dr Raymond Parks

With thanks to Suzanne Harvey

‘the irrepressibly pianistic David Wilde projects a dozen Chopin tracks, including a majestically structured account of the B Minor Sonata Opus 58 and a selection of Mazurkas and an exceptionally thoughtful performance of the Berceuse.’

– Musical Opinion, December 2005

Dallapiccola: a portrait David Wilde piano; Susan Hamilton soprano Robert Irvine ‘cello; Nicola Stonehouse mezzo-soprano DCD34020 Luigi Dallapiccola is one of the most celebrated composers of Italy’s twentieth century. Coupled with his complete works for solo piano, this disc features other solo and chamber works, demonstrating the breadth of his oeuvre. Whether inciting tumbling chimes of bells in the voice, zestful rhythmic tintinnabulations in the piano, or deeply-exploring twelve-tone techniques, Dallapiccola’s commitment to traditional expressive nuance has been seen by critics as a powerful aspect of his Italian insistence upon ‘cantabilita’ – songfulness.

‘This is an expertly programmed and very finely performed selection.

David Wilde is the motor and he displays a sure affinity with Dallapiccola sufficient to warrant admiration.’

– musicweb, February 2007

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Notes on the Music

David Wilde Pianist and composer David Wilde was born in Manchester in 1935. His boyhood career in the Fylde area of Lancashire during World War II (with his first broadcast in 1942 and first concerto (Grieg) in 1943) was brought to the attention of Solomon and his pupil and assistant, composer/pianist Franz Reizenstein, with whom Wilde studied from 1945 to 1947 and who laid the foundations of his technique. A frequent soloist at the Henry Wood Proms, working with such conductors as Horenstein, Boulez and Downes, he shared with Jacqueline du Près the honour of opening the BBC’s second TV channel in the North of England with Sir John Barbirolli and the Hallé Orchestra in 1962, and was a soloist at the Royal Concert the same year.

During the 1990s he composed many works protesting against human rights abuses in our time and was twice honoured by the city of Sarajevo. The ‘Cellist of Sarajevo (1992), dedicated to Vedran Smailovic, is played the world over and was recorded by Yo-Yo Ma for Sony Classical, and the opera London Under Siege, after an idea by Bosnian poet Goran Simic, was produced by the State Theatre of Lower Saxony in 1998.

As a pianist Wilde has won several major prizes, including a first at the Liszt-Bartók competition in Budapest in 1961. The legendary Nadia Boulanger was a jury member and invited him to Paris for further study. He remained in close touch with ‘Mademoiselle’, who described Wilde publicly as ‘Superb performer, magnificent musician’ for the rest of her long life. Professor of Piano at the Music Academy in Hannover from 1981 to 2000, he moved to Edinburgh in 2001, where he is Visiting Professor in Keyboard Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He continues to play, write, compose and teach.

Recordings include the complete Sonatas for violin and piano by Beethoven with Erich Gruenberg; the Sonata for violin and piano by his master Franz Reizenstein, also with Gruenberg; the Thomas Wilson Concerto (composed for Wilde), and works by Schumann, Liszt and Chopin. Wilde now records exclusively for Delphian; previous recordings include a Chopin recital and the complete piano works of Luigi Dallapiccola. Forthcoming issues include a disc of Brahms and the complete Preludes and Fugues of Reizenstein.

Future premieres will include a new piano work from composer Gabriel Jackson, which Wilde has commissioned with funds from the Scottish Arts Council.

Liszt and Busoni are enigmatic geniuses. Both were pianists of legendary stature who took an ambivalent view of their public acclaim.

Torn between active and contemplative lives they sought to reconcile warring elements in their personalities ironically achieving their greatness through the resulting hyper-tension.

For Liszt, very possibly the greatest of all pianists, the art of the virtuoso (memorably summarized by him as making ‘emotion weep and sing and sigh’ and ‘breathe the breath of life’) quickly became tarnished or degraded and, finally, feeling that he wore a tinsel rather than a golden crown, he retired from public view into a near monastic seclusion where he composed music of the strangest prophecy and dark-hued romanticism supposedly claiming, ‘I have hurled my lance far into the future’. Here, the bells that rang out during the flamboyant ‘glanz’ years in, for example, the La Campanella Étude are transformed into the Angelus from the Third Années de Pélerinage, Italy, music of the strangest desolation and a truly extraordinary change from, in Liszt’s own words, ‘exuberance of the heart’ to ‘bitterness of the heart’.

Busoni, too, retreated into idealism. Given to lofty aphorisms such as ‘Bach is the foundation of piano playing, Liszt is the summit. The two make Beethoven possible’, he discarded one musical luminary after another. Schumann and Mendelssohn quickly

became irrelevant to this thoughts and he passed from distaste to worship to final rejection of Liszt. Again, in his own words ‘Chopin has attracted and repulsed me all my life; I have heard his music too oftenprostituted, profaned, vulgarized...’ Only Mozart survived his scrutiny though even his beloved Figaro was seen to have flaws prompting a final reflection on the transitoriness of even the finest human achievement. As a pianist Busoni’s magisterial performances (‘as well confine the Atlantic ocean in a milk bottle as confine Busoni to records’) finally concentrated exclusively on Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. His final appearance in 1922 was devoted to an all Mozart programme of twelve Piano Concertos. Grand and formidably intellectual to the last he advised all pianists ‘never to be carried away by temperament’ the reverse of Liszt and, in more recent times, Vladimir Horowitz (‘without temperament, nothing’).

Such a preamble is necessary if we are to understand the nature of Busoni’s music and particularly the seven Elegies composed in 1907 and showing a formidable change of attitude and direction. Here, memories of Berlioz, Liszt and Brahms are subsumed into a dark, wholly personal idiom. ‘Nach der Wendung. Recueillement’ confirms Busoni’s seriousness and austerity while ‘All’Italia.

In modo napoletano’ recalls ideas from the

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Notes on the Music outsized Piano Concerto of 1903- 4. ‘Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu Dir. Choralvorspiel’ has its origins in the hymn Allein Gott in der Hoh’ sei Ehr’d while its title (‘To God alone in the heights’) is a quotation from the Psalms.

‘Turandots Frauengemach. Intermezzo’ is a reworking of music from Turandot, a concert piece from 1904, though the theme for the music’s Chinese context is, oddly enough, Greensleeves. ‘Die Nachtlichen. Walzer’ is another reworking from the Turandot suite, while ‘Erscheinung. Notturno’ recalls earlier material from Busoni’s first opera, Die Brautwahl. Finally, ‘Berceuse’ was composed in memory of Busoni’s mother and added as a form of post-script to the other elegies.

All this music with its Janus-like look into both the past and the future could be by no other composer, the thoughts and afterthoughts, as it were, of a composer in a profound state of transition.

Yet only a truly transcendental technique can free the pianist from Liszt’s alpine difficulties, allowing him to focus on the music’s ‘still centre’ a poetic and spiritual heart or nucleus that has proved as elusive as ever. Only then can he fully respond to repeated requests for delicacy as well as strength, for intimacy as well as heroic grandeur. Directions such as dolce con grazia are a true foil for sempre forte e agitato, and a mystical serenity has the last word. After one of music’s most dramatic pauses the tumult of Liszt’s fiercely concentrated argument (for many Faust’s battle with Mephistopheles) is stilled in a retrospective and visionary epilogue. Here, Liszt’s chorale-like transformation of one of his principal themes and the sinister rattle of Mephistopheles’s reply gradually fade into oblivion; a distant chime of bells and a final staccato affirmation of the home key, and an epic creation has vanished for ever.

Liszt’s Sonata in B minor (1853) is his crowning masterpiece, and its fearless originality has been repeatedly and variously celebrated. Once considered both incomprehensible and unplayable the Sonata achieved notable prominence during the 1930s when it was closely associated with Vladimir Horowitz. Since that time the Sonata has become the darling of the concert and, more ominously, competition circuit, the property of novice and expert alike.

The sense of a titanic struggle between opposing forces has seldom been so potently expressed and can awe even those hostile to Liszt’s supposed theatricality or insincerity and surplus bravura. Such people, together with pianists who see the Sonata primarily as a fast and furious assault course, should ponder Hanslick’s description of Liszt’s playing which was apparently ‘free, poetic, replete with imaginative shading, and, at the same time, characterised by noble artistic repose’.

Composers ranging from Wagner to Copland have praised Liszt to the heavens, and today it is difficult not to see the Sonata as his supreme resolution of a life-long vacillation between temporal and spiritual emotion.

A world where ‘glassy sighs and menacing threats’ are resolved into a state of religious grace. Small wonder that this landmark in the history of Western music should continue to challenge the giant and murder the mediocre. *

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I hope I will not exceed my role as annotator by commenting briefly on David Wilde’s achievement. I first heard him play the Busoni Elegies at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.

I also heard his earlier recording of the Liszt Sonata. These performances, as cogent as they were lucid and powerful, have long stayed in my memory, yet they are surely far excelled by Delphian’s present offering.

Here, surely, is blazing confirmation of what Sir Michael Tippett once called ‘the immense effort of interpretation’, by a rare communicative vividness and force. In a time of increasing musical homogeneity David Wilde’s Liszt and Busoni stand out for their very special drama and integrity. © 2007 Bryce Morrison

Bryce Morrison is an internationally famous teacher, critic, broadcaster and pianist and is considered among the world's leading authorities on piano performance.