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Keyboard Thursday album review: Pianist William Wolfram tops Liszt Everest of Wagner opera transcriptions

By John Terauds on September 19, 2013

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Blend Richard Wagner’s complex operatic music with Franz Liszt’s love of fireworks, and you get the sort of showstopping pieces that only an iron-fingered, adrenaline-junkie pianist would dare tackle.

liszt36With its Naxos-typical bland cover, there is no visual clue that there is anything special lurking inside Vol. 36 — yes, 36 — of the budget label’s ongoing survey of the complete piano music of Liszt (1811-1886). But New York City-based pianist William Wolfram — recorded at Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio by master Canadian experts Norbert and Bonnie Kraft — serves us up something truly special.

Liszt wrote piano transcriptions and reminiscences and fantasies on popular opera arias and themes of the day, as did many other composers. This is the way people played back the hits of the moment before music could be recorded. But it’s highly unlikely that many private homes resonated with Liszt’s fearsome pieces.

Liszt’s are works for the concert stage, demanding the highest degrees of technique and musical finesse from the pianist. They are meant to dazzle as much as entertain, and to treat the piano as a virtual symphony orchestra, vocal soloist and chorus, rolled into 85 keys (in the days before Steinway introduced an 88-key piano).

The rock-star pianist and Wagner — the 19th century opera world’s combination mad genius and desperado — met in 1840 and eventually had a tight bond, with Wagner dependent on Liszt’s support to escape his numerous scrapes with cuckolded husbands and unpaid creditors. Wagner even married Liszt’s daughter Cosima.

The closeness of the relationship is evident everywhere in the loving attention Liszt pays to Wagner’s music. Vol. 36 features popular sections from the operas Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman, Tristan und Isolde, Lohengrin and Tannhäuser — all ably rendered by Wolfram.

The finest achievement on this album is how Wolfram finds the right balance between the grand and showy and the intimate. And, aurally anyway, it doesn’t sound as if the pianist is even breaking a sweat.

The music is a treat from start to finish — so much so that I don’t feel I’m missing a full orchestra at all.

You’ll find all the details here.

Here is Wolfram with the Liebestod from Tristan during the recording sessions at the Glenn Gould Studio:

John Terauds

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