Liszt / Gavrilova / Lytkina - Oh Quand Je Dors - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Erik Simmons - Litany [COMPACT DISCS] date 03/25/2014

Internationally renowned soloist Lucille Chung performs a programme of virtuosic and beguiling works by Franz Liszt. One of the first female students of the iconic Russian pianist Lazar Berman at the Accademia Pianistica in Imola, Italy, Chung has won numerous awards for her performances of Liszt's music, including the B minor Sonata that features on this programme - although Lucille describes in her introduction to the programme how Berman Inch... for a time doubted that a diminutive lady with hands spanning a 9th (although I can now stretch a 10th on a good day) would ever succeed in playing Liszt well... Mr Berman came around.Inch Renowned for her Inchblazing gutsy performance[s]Inch (The Washington Post), Lucille Chung has been acclaimed for her Inchstylish and refined performancesInch by Gramophone magazine, Inchcombining vigour and suppleness with natural eloquence and eleganceInch (Le Soir).

It was Inchthe great meanings of the ancientsInch that drove Goethe to Italy and Mendelssohn to Scotland. Literati and musicians are united by a preoccupation with the past, searching for themselves in the foreign and distant. This is more than mere intellectual curiosity; to receive fresh stimuli for one's own work from the ancients is like an act of self-assurance through questioning those masters who form the canon of knowledge and to whom new voices must be gallantly added. By showing personal reverence through artistic references, artists have always created new forms of expression in the footsteps of the past. Bringing such interactions to light is the goal of this album. The collected works show examples of how pioneering this attitude is. It was Mendelssohn who was the impetus for the Bach renaissance in the mid-nineteenth century. It directly affected Clara and Robert Schumann as well as Franz Liszt, whose piano transcriptions of Bach's organ works open the recording. Like many composers, Liszt was drawn to Italy, whose cultural heritage, including Renaissance paintings and poems by Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch, captivated him. Petrarch in particular appealed to Liszt and Schumann. The latter read his poems and translated them; Liszt set them to music. Dante's InchDivine ComedyInch was also omnipresent. Liszt's resounding Dante reading concludes the series of selected works that push us back, as it were, into the future.