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A little Liszt can go a long way,
but if anyone can turn a full evening of Liszt's grandly Romantic
piano music into an edifying experience, it is Leslie Howard.
To say that Mr. Howard is a Liszt specialist is to understate
his efforts. His most durable project is a 96-disc traversal
of the composer's complete piano music for the Hyperion label.
While preparing that series Mr. Howard edited many of Liszt's
unpublished manuscripts, and he included a few rarities in his
program on Tuesday evening, part of the International Keyboard
Institute and Festival at the Mannes College of Music.
One was the "Grosses Konzertsolo," a
precursor of the B minor Sonata. A few of the ideas - or, at
least, gestures - that Liszt worked out further in the Sonata
make an early appearance here. This is Liszt at his showiest,
a muscular essay that ranges over the full keyboard and seems
all but impossible to play with only two hands. It also has
all the moves that can be found in parodies of flashy Romantic
pianism. (Think of Chico Marx's set pieces.) Thundering bass
chords, punctuated by pairs of quickly splashed chords at the
top of the keyboard, give way to slow, mooning themes that
angle their way through the middle range, accompanied by the
machine-gun ripple of a treble obbligato.
There may be more to this piece than immediately meets the ear;
certainly some of the connections, both thematic and formal,
might be interesting to explore. Mostly, though, it was easier
to be swept away by the performance than by the work itself.
Mr. Howard's dramatic reading made it exciting in purely visceral
terms and gave it the quality of a guilty pleasure - a classical
equivalent of, say, an Iron Maiden concert, at which virtuosity
and showmanship sometimes eclipse the music at hand.
Mr. Howard illuminated other sides of
Liszt as well. In "Les
Adieux - Rêverie sur un Motif de l'Opéra de Charles
Gounod 'Roméo et Juliette,' " he touched on the dreamier,
more delicately lyrical side of Liszt's work. He turned the variations
on a theme from a Bach cantata, "Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen,
Sagen," into a pitched battle between Baroque and Romantic
styles, with graceful renderings of the Bach chorale (sometimes
complete with trills) appearing periodically amid Lisztian filigree
and thrashing. Mr. Howard's restored version of the "Fantasy
on Themes From Mozart's 'Figaro' and 'Don Giovanni' " showed
how ingenious Liszt could be when working with first-rate material.
The International Keyboard Institute and Festival continues
through Sunday at the Mannes College of Music, 150 West 85th
Street, Manhattan, (212) 580-0210, extension 4858. |
