LDV100

All the same, looking at the discography of your teachers, especially those at the Paris Conservatoire, one can see that Liszt wasn’t absent from their repertory. Raymond Trouard made several albums of his music and even Vlado Perlemuter recorded the Sonata in B minor . . . As you can imagine, I didn’t work on Liszt in Perlemuter’s class. It was different with Raymond Trouard, a remarkable Lisztian, even if the technique he taught – what he called ‘high articulation’ – was the opposite of what I had learnt from Perlemuter. On the other hand, though, I was lucky enough to have a wonderful harmony teacher at the Conservatoire, Alain Bernaud, who worshipped Liszt and made me study the B minor Sonata in depth. I bless those weeks I spent poring over the score! I kept my annotations and you can’t imagine how valuable they were to me later on. On an anecdotal level, I remember the ‘antipodal progressions’ that our teacher used to point out (here from 5’52 to 6’04, 13’49 to 14’02, 24’13 to 24’24), that is, chord progressions that are the opposite of each other, a system later taken up by Bartók and Kodály and also found in jazz. 20 LISZT | ONCE UPON A TIME