Customer Reviews

Liszt: Music For Piano And Orchestra 1 / Howard (The Complete Music For Solo Piano)

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Leslie Howard--What would we do without him??? He's a music giant! He serves us both as a musician and a Liszt-historian, tracking down some long-lost scores of Liszt's music and bringing them to life and to the public for the first time, in some cases since the debut of the works' performance, in some cases the first time ever.
This, plus Vol. 2 of this series-within-a-series is some of the greatest music ever written combining the forces of a piano virtuoso with a symphony orchestra (Right up there with Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov), and not only top-notch performances of the classic Concerto #1 (#2 is on Vol 2) and the Totentanz, there's also the beautiful Fantasy on Berlioz's Lelio, the long-abandoned Concerto in E-Flat (believed to be #3 for many years), a Concerto arranged for strings-only with piano, a Fantasy on Beethoven's "Ruins of Athens" culminating in the great "March of the Turks", and a version of Carl Maria von Weber's "Grand Polonaise Brilliante" that Liszt re-arranged for piano and orchestra (He does this same feat with Schubert's "Wanderer Fantasie" on the next vol.) showing Liszt's impeccable talent for working well with other composers' music.
The sound of this all-digital collection is fabulous--Perhaps a little on the compressed side, but I certainly could let that slide in favor of the material! And did I mention Leslie Howard can play?? Boy can he!! If you really like Liszt, this is a MUST-HAVE!!

Run on sentence, but it's true. There's a volume II which covers the gamut of Liszt's writing for piano & orchestra. I'm familiar with a few other performances of the piano concerti and these compare favorably, believe me. The other unfamiliar pieces are very entertaining and as we expect from Liszt go from great highs to a few questionable passages but there's so much good music on these two long discs I'd say snatch this one right up along with the next volume.