... May well be Leslie Howard's prodigious pianistic achievement, recordings of the complete works for solo piano of Franz Liszt. Liszt, a great admirer and promoter of many other composers and their works, transcribed many of his favourite works for piano, including many works originally composed for operas. For those familiar with the original works, hearing the Lizst transcriptions may enable one to hear the original works afresh, and to gain a renewed appreciation for the genius of Lizst, and his titanic contribution to pianistic literature. For those unfamiliar with either Lizst's works or those pieces he transcribed, these recordings afford a window on an entire universe of music: one can listen to a recording of a Lizst transcription, and be led on to realms of music discoveries.
As an example of one such transcription, here is Leslie Howard's recording of the transcription of the Overture for Les Francs-Juges, an opera Berlioz abandoned:
Part I:
Part II:
Comments (23)
In my opinion the cornerstone of a classical music collection should begin with Brilliant Classics' boxed sets. You can get complete or nearly complete collections of the works of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, and a great many others at absurdly low prices. I have several of these sets and the recordings are almost uniformly excellent.
Posted by Michael Sullivan | January 11, 2010 12:18 PM
Oh, I agree completely. I just meant to emphasize the branching effect of the Lizst series, which can take the dedicated collector far afield of the well-worn paths.
Posted by Maximos | January 11, 2010 1:16 PM
I am a bit of two minds. Lizst's piano reductions (which were a main-stay of salon music during the time before the player piano, especially in the United States), were one way to expose people to a slightly broader range of music than simply folk music, but it does leave something to be desired in terms of scoring with regards to timbral uses in orchestral music. For opera, not so much a problem. Schumman probably had better timbral mimicry in his piano works, while Liszt had better expressive qualities. Thus, I would much rather have Liszt reduce an opera, but Schumann a symphony.
The Chicken
Posted by The Masked Chicken | January 11, 2010 1:39 PM
Thus, I would much rather have Liszt reduce an opera, but Schumann a symphony.
Hmm. I'd have to consider that. I'm really quite fond of the Lizst-Beethoven transcriptions.
Posted by Maximos | January 11, 2010 2:39 PM
Wow! - the francs-juges Overture just sounds like a totally different piece, in pianistic guise!
I'm not going to throw out my Beecham or Colin Davis recordings of the original, or even the period-instruments version with Roger Norrington - but this is great fun.
I've always had very mixed feelings about Liszt. In some ways, he was the prototype of the modern pop-star, complete with a notoriously dissolute personal life.
On the other hand, he was incredibly sophisticated as a musician & wonderfully generous as a man. He recognized the genius of his greater contemporaries - Berlioz, Chopin, Wagner, Verdi &c - and did everything he could to help them.
And one of the ways he helped them was to transcribe their works for the piano & to perform them - an important public service in a time when orchestras were few and far between and recordings were nonexistent.
The amazing thing is that his transcriptions are still worth listening to, as great works in their own right, long after their original purpose has become moot.
Posted by steve burton | January 11, 2010 4:06 PM
btw - s before z in "Liszt"
Posted by steve burton | January 11, 2010 4:18 PM
Michael Sullivan - the Brilliant Classics Boxes really are amazing bargains. *All* the performances & recordings in these sets are serviceable, *most* are excellent, and a *few* are great classics of the gramophone.
My only possible objection would be that they offer, if anything, too much music with too little guidance.
There is, after all, quite a lot of not-so-great music by even the greatest composers. It takes a lot of sifting.
Posted by steve burton | January 11, 2010 4:32 PM
Chicken: what on earth are you talking about?
"...it does leave something to be desired in terms of scoring with regards to timbral uses in orchestral music. For opera, not so much a problem. Schumann probably had better timbral mimicry in his piano works, while Liszt had better expressive qualities. Thus, I would much rather have Liszt reduce an opera, but Schumann a symphony..."
I like you, but this is painful gibberish.
Posted by steve burton | January 11, 2010 4:40 PM
There is, after all, quite a lot of not-so-great music by even the greatest composers. It takes a lot of sifting.
I adore Bach, thinking him the greatest of composers. But as someone who has listened to the complete cycle of Sacred Cantatas numerous times, well there are some less-than-inspired works in there.
Posted by Maximos | January 11, 2010 6:26 PM
btw - s before z in "Liszt"
I've had the bad habit of transposing the letters since childhood. I'll get it right, before I die - hopefully.
Posted by Maximos | January 11, 2010 6:42 PM
I doubt my professors in either the doctoral program in musicology or the doctoral program in performance or my colleagues in acoustics, or the people who awarded me first-prize, three times, in the music area in the University-wide Graduate Student Research Forum Competition (I am the only person to have won more than once) would agree with that assessment. Granted, my areas of expertise are Medieval and Twentieth-Century music, but I have studied Schumann's piano technique and scoring in graduate school in some detail (not so much Liszt's) and I stand by what I said. The scoring and techniques of both men show that the one (Schumann) had a better ability to reflect certain aspects of tone color more common in a broader range of orchestral scoring during the period than the other, while the other (Liszt) had a better expressive range. That Liszt did a good reduction of Beethoven is not surprising, as their compositional styles are remarkably similar.
On the other hand, I haven't worked much in academic music, recently, as I prefer to make my money in the the sciences (although I still play and am quite well-known in the field of woodwind acoustics), so maybe I am just rusty, but I didn't think I was THAT rusty.
I am not a beginner in music nor do I function at a music-appreciation level. I do not write gibberish, at least usually. Perhaps, I just have brain damage and can no longer appreciate that I no longer make sense.
Sorry. Bad day.
The Chicken
Posted by The Masked Chicken | January 11, 2010 7:46 PM
Sorry, Steve. My comment, above, was really uncalled for (talk about hurt pride). I withdraw it in humility and apologize.
It has been kind of a sore subject with me, over the years, that no matter how much I study (and I was at the top of my class in musicology in at least one of my graduate programs), I will never have the easy ability to sound cultured. Everybody in the music department knew that I didn't sound like the other people in the program, being more comfortable with the analysis and the scientific study of music (what musicology was originally supposed to be) than most others.
I guess this being a post on music, I thought should be able to make some sort of contribution, but you guys give me an inferiority complex. Really. To me, I sound like a fifth-grader, while you guys sound like professionals. I guess I don't know what to make of this.
This ends this installment of Spilling-Your-Guts Theater.
The Chicken
Posted by The Masked Chicken | January 11, 2010 8:09 PM
Maximos,
I also owe you an apology for my comments, above. I guess I have found out where I need to grow, a little (a lot). Sorry to put it on public display.
The Chicken
Posted by The Masked Chicken | January 11, 2010 8:41 PM
I also owe you an apology for my comments, above.
You don't owe me an apology, MC. I'm not a musicologist, just a guy who wishes he had gone to grad school for philosophy - probably for political philosophy, though I briefly considered aesthetics - despite recognizing, at an early age, that the culture is often impoverished, much of the resulting work is worthless, and that there aren't any jobs, anyway. So, I'm happy enough to receive academic commentary on some of my favourite composers. I can make some intellectual sense of the comments comparing Schumann and Liszt, though I haven't the training to consider what they mean as a matter of experience.
Posted by Maximos | January 11, 2010 9:41 PM
My only possible objection would be that they offer, if anything, too much music with too little guidance.
There is, after all, quite a lot of not-so-great music by even the greatest composers. It takes a lot of sifting.
While this is true, I think it's a benefit in many ways. Listening to all those serenades and divertimenti makes you both appreciate Mozart more and put him in his proper place. It's a good corrective for that "Amadeus"-genius view that every note he wrote came straight from the Holy Spirit. Not that any of it's bad, but that being "Mozartian" doesn't mean it's better than anything else.
The musical bulk also makes you decide what you really like without relying on the 70-minute greatest hits compilations to tell you which works are the great ones. I think this is a good thing too.
Finally, some of the complete sets can show that a composer with a much smaller total output can still be very very good. The Brilliant Corelli set is only around ten discs (I forget the exact number) but there's not a stinker in the bunch. I prefer the Andrew Manze recording of the sonatas, but it's always nice to have two.
Posted by Michael Sullivan | January 12, 2010 8:18 AM
Re: philosophy: the culture is often impoverished, much of the resulting work is worthless, and that there aren't any jobs, anyway.
As someone finishing up his doctorate in philosophy I can attest to this. I think in the first two areas my university (CUA) is better than most: one of the few places in the country you can really study the Catholic philosophical tradition with professors who take it seriously. That includes most "Catholic" universities. And I'm proud of my own work, at least. But there aren't any jobs, and the climate of the field is very depressing.
Posted by Michael Sullivan | January 12, 2010 8:21 AM
The Brilliant Corelli set is only around ten discs (I forget the exact number) but there's not a stinker in the bunch.
Corelli, as he approached the end of his mortal sojourn, destroyed every one of his works he considered mediocre in the slightest; hence, everything that remains is very nearly sublime.
Posted by Maximos | January 12, 2010 9:43 AM
I've always had very mixed feelings about Liszt. In some ways, he was the prototype of the modern pop-star, complete with a notoriously dissolute personal life.
Couldn't one say something similar about Mozart, half a century earlier? The difference, I suppose, is that the tenor of the the romantic period made it possible for Liszt to succeed at it, in a way Mozart really couldn't, in his more aristocratic times.
Posted by Maximos | January 12, 2010 1:48 PM
OK, chicken - "gibberish" was too harsh. I should simply have said that I found much of what you said puzzling, and what I didn't find puzzling I disagreed with.
But there's probably no point in pursuing this.
Posted by steve burton | January 12, 2010 8:53 PM
Maximos -
"I'm not a musicologist, just a guy who wishes he had gone to grad school for philosophy - probably for political philosophy, though I briefly considered aesthetics..."
I didn't know that, about you.
Speaking as one who's been there & done that, I think you're probably very lucky that you didn't try it. I think you would have found the environment even more hostile than I did.
Posted by steve burton | January 12, 2010 9:03 PM
Michael Sullivan:
Fair enough. But still - there might be a middle ground between the 170-disc Brilliant Classics Mozart Edition and the 1-disc "greatest hits compilation." (And likewise for Bach, & Handel, & Haydn, & Beethoven, & Schubert, &c &c &c.
Hmmm...a project for me...
Posted by steve burton | January 12, 2010 9:20 PM
I don't think Brilliant Classics has a Handel edition. If they did I would buy it.
Also, there is a middle ground: Brilliant has a series of 40-disc sets of "masterworks" by various composers, many of them also represented in the complete editions.
I'll stop advertising now.
Posted by Michael Sullivan | January 12, 2010 11:06 PM
"But there's probably no point in pursuing this."
Steve,
Thanks for letting me off the hook, gently. I will try to be clearer and less touchy in the future.
Posted by The Masked Chicken | January 13, 2010 11:41 AM