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Liszt: Funeral Odes, From The Cradle To The Grave - Volkov, Bbc Scottish Symphony (2011)

Posted By: peotuvave
Liszt: Funeral Odes, From The Cradle To The Grave - Volkov, Bbc Scottish Symphony (2011)

Liszt: Funeral Odes, From The Cradle To The Grave - Volkov, Bbc Scottish Symphony (2011)
EAC Rip | Flac (Image + cue + log) | 1 CD | Full Scans | 297 MB
Genre: Classical | Label: Hyperion | Catalog Number: 67856

As part of Liszt’s anniversary year Hyperion turns to some of the composer’s most underrecorded and underperformed works. Liszt’s piano music is so much in the foreground that his works for orchestra have been almost forgotten. Here we present a fascinating selection.

Liszt’s Trois Odes funèbres were composed between 1860 and 1866, and exist in a variety of versions: for orchestra, for piano solo and for piano duet. There is also a chorus in the first Ode and the possibility of a narrator in the first and second. The first is also an organ piece, with the title Trauerode, and La notte also exists for violin and piano. The third of the Odes is also entitled ‘Epilogue to the Symphonic Poem: Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo’, and in its orchestral version it enjoyed a certain vogue towards the end of the nineteenth century. Although it is quite clear from the original manuscripts that Liszt intended these works to be performed as a cycle, they have never been published together and have rarely been performed as he wished. This is the first recording of the complete set.

‘From the cradle to the grave’ was written after a drawing by the Hungarian artist Mihály Zichy (1827–1906) depicting three stages of existence: birth; the struggle for being; and death, the cradle of the life to come.

The Faust legend preoccupied Liszt for much of his life, and inspired the composer’s most famous orchestral work, the Faust Symphony. However Zwei Episoden aus Lenaus Faust also contains some of the composer’s most thrillingly atmospheric music.

Composer: Franz Liszt
Conductor: Ilan Volkov
Orchestra/Ensemble: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Reviews: The centerpiece of this fairly sober collection is the Trois Odes funèbres (1860-66). This triptych is rarely encountered. In fact, except for the pioneering CD by Karl Anton Rickenbacher, reviewed in Fanfare 20:6, this is the only recording I’ve come across that offers the full set in its orchestral guise. But as is so often the case with buried Lisztiana, its obscurity is no reflection of its quality. What, then, explains the neglect? It’s certainly not any failure in Liszt’s technique; written in the wake of the first 12 tone poems and the two symphonies, it shows Liszt as a master of balance and color. Nor is there any failure in artistic concentration; unlike some of Liszt’s second-drawer throwaways (say, the Ungarischer Sturmmarsch ), there’s not a cheap gesture, not a moment of banality in its more than half-hour trajectory. Rather, I suspect the Odes are left unplayed because of their unwavering emotional severity. The first two panels ( Les Morts, La Notte ) are Liszt’s responses to the deaths of his son Daniel and his daughter Blandine—and while the third ( Le Triomphe funèbre de Tasse ) does not seem to spring from anything so immediate, it shares their sober gravity. If the Faust Symphony has a counterpart in Berlioz’s recklessly flamboyant Damnation de Faust , the Odes have their counterpart in Berlioz’s austere Funeral March for the Last Scene of Hamlet.


Musically, the Odes occupy a curiously contradictory middle ground. Although Leslie Howard (who has recorded the piano version, and whose knowledgeable notes for that CD have been revised for use here) refers to the “extremely forward-looking chromaticism,” the music has more in common harmonically with, say, the Dante Symphony than it does with the late piano works (indeed, portions of Les Morts could be easily folded into the Dante Symphony ’s concluding Magnificat). At the same time, in its simplified gestural vocabulary—its stripped-down textures, its stark outlines, and most of all its obstinacy—the triptych does have more in common with the late experiments than with its more extravagant contemporaries. Especially if you know Liszt well, the resulting combination of temporally disjunct idioms evokes an eerie sense of dislocation, a kind of timeless hovering, that serves as a poignant underpinning for this self-possessed but profound expression of grief.


That out-of-time sensation is magnified by a number of musical cross-references that serve as remembrances of things past: La Notte , for instance, takes its basic material from “Il Penseroso” from the second book of Années ; there are a few muted echoes of Liszt’s audience-pleasing “Hungarian” style; most evocatively, Le Triomphe funèbre de Tasse recalls, with a sense of inconsolable loss, certain thematic fragments from the tone poem Tasso . The sense of timelessness is heightened further by the music’s backward-looking religious references, both the use of Gregorian themes and the inclusion, in Les Morts , of brief, dignified contributions—almost entirely in rhythmic unison—from a male chorus intoning familiar sacred texts in Latin.


Ilan Volkov’s performance is an impressive one, patiently capturing the music’s subtle timbral effects (listen to the way the clarinet line emerges from near inaudibility five measures after rehearsal B in La Notte ) and coaxing out its anguish without histrionics. If this were more familiar terrain, you might murmur a few complaints—while the interpretation is well rehearsed, it doesn’t sound quite lived-in, and there are a few moments (say, in the central section of La Notte ) where unfamiliarity breeds dutifulness, even stiffness. Given the rarity of the repertoire, though, it would be churlish to demand more.


The Odes are sandwiched between appropriate discmates, both of which get similarly intelligent and sensitive readings. Granted, Von de Wiege is also dotted with moments that are more competent than inspired: The strings in the opening are marvelously flexible, but the flutes could be more seductive, and the final section could be darker and colder. But the emphatic reading of the Episodes is top-notch, with fine attention to the music’s timbral imagination (listen to the chill of the stopped horns toward the beginning of Der nächtliche Zug ) and its shocking jolts. The disc is all the more welcome for Volkov’s decision to play the most familiar item—the ever-popular Mephisto Waltz No. 1, which serves as the second of the Episodes —with its less-familiar quiet ending. Excellent sound, too. All in all, essential for Lisztians.

Tracklisting:

1. Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe, S 107 by Franz Liszt
Conductor: Ilan Volkov
Orchestra/Ensemble: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Period: Romantic
Written: 1881-1882; Rome, Italy

2. Odes funèbres (3), S 112 by Franz Liszt
Conductor: Ilan Volkov
Orchestra/Ensemble: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Period: Romantic
Written: 1863-1864; Weimar, Germany

3. Episodes from Lenau's Faust, S 110 by Franz Liszt
Conductor: Ilan Volkov
Orchestra/Ensemble: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Period: Romantic
Written: 1861; Weimar, Germany

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