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22 FRANZ LISZT
When did you discover Liszt, and with which work?
I hadmy first piano lessons at the age of thirteen, and I was fourteenwhen I tackled
Liszt for the first time. It was a fairly difficult work, the second
Étude d’exécution
transcendante
, an agile piecemade up of short, incisive phrases, finally very modern
compared to the other work by Liszt that I learnt a year later,
Saint François de Paule
marchant sur les flots
, which immediately appealed tome with its narrative element
and its typically Lisztian ‘imagery’.
In six works you tackle every aspect of Liszt as a composer for the piano:
paraphrase (if one can really call the Fantasia and Fugue on B-A-C-H a
paraphrase – it’smore of a‘recreation’), transcription, the pseudo-folkloric
vein, and original creation. How did you structure your programme?
Of course, the programme of this disc is conceived around the Sonata in B minor.
The works that surround it here might be seen as a prolongation of that work,
of the elements that go to make up the language of Liszt, and of the Sonata in
particular, which is unique of its kind.
First of all, Liszt the ‘rhapsodist’, the improviser, the Hungarian. In fact the Sonata
opens with scales in alternating Greek and Hungarian modes.