Customer Reviews

Transcendental Etudes

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A North American Virtuoso reading - Fire, Gold, High Intellect, Gilt luxuries of Deep Ease...

It is perhaps easier to mention what listeners mostly will not find on this disc, than to characterize it as a musical reading, fully. First off, nobody will find a bad piano, poorly recorded. The instrument at hand is a Steinway D Concert Grand (502106), tuned to racing car precision by piano technician Ron Conors. Secondly, though this is a red book PCM recording, the special selection of electronics used by the engineers includes refurbished tube amplified microphones (Neumann M50), and a 20-bit dCS converter to digitize the original analog signal from those tube microphones.

The yield is sensuous and immediate at first hearing: Russell Sherman's touch and tone colors exude warmth, presence, and admirable clarity of definition floating in just the right amounts of room air. One especially gets one's brain immersed, listening on headphones; but a good rig will repeat much of that, out into your listening rooms.

A third thing missing nearly completely from this reading is any marked sense of unease or strain. Even the keyboard thunders which help define Liszt as a piano composer come across, not so much as an impression of a great physical player pushing even a very capable modern instrument towards its inevitable earthly limits, as an impression (an experience?) of a modern master player releasing music through sound, from its particulars in the modern concert grand piano to its universal sweep and scope.

Those listeners who like a heavy, good Romantic Era romp through Franz Liszt, as if either he or his music, or at least the piano itself, were breaking through so far as to risk a fiery life and death trial by brute and superhuman nervous breakdown? Those listeners may be disappointed by this reading. Sherman is as complete a piano virtuoso as nearly anybody else who has attempted to record these Mount Everest etudes of Chopin-Liszt-Schumann tradition. (Kemal Gekic, Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Jorge Bolet, Claudio Arrau?) But he so nearly encompasses both his marvelous and ready instrument and the composer's imagination that despite all the plentiful fire and flash, the dominant sense that stays with a listener through all twelve etudes, right to the end - is - a bedrock capability of commandingly self-confident realms and cosmic lights.

The two players who most consistently communicate this sense of knowing that they know what they know musically are - ready? - very different from Russell Sherman. I am thinking of Czech master Ivan Moravec, and Italian master Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

These piano etudes can sound so busy that they surely must require three hands. Most very good virtuosos still sound two-handed enough that their hard work must become part and parcel of the musical values being expressed. Stress, strain, breaking a musical sweat - all these enter into the tone colors, phrasings, and overall eloquence of the twelve-piece cycle traversed. Yet Sherman's Liszt never really seems on the verge of a musical nervous breakdown, however much he strides in great piano league boots across all manner of High Romantic Era keyboard-isms.

Take Ricordanza for a tender example, and sample. Sherman spins out those breathless, Bel Canto musical lyrics with impressive angst and savoring remembrance, yet never for a split second sounds as if he is about to dissolve in a tearful-silent screen pout of over-emoting to get across tristesse, nostalgia, and such. When the melodious lyric goes down low into the middle piano and slowly builds back again, Sherman does not sound as if he is disappearing beneath the surging musical waves, overcome by too much strong feeling welling up. So expertly does he conjure an equal mix of intellect and feeling that we earthly mere mortals must cease projecting our petty moods and vapors upon the gods and goddesses; dimly awakening to a larger, higher sort of paradox, transcendent memory where even that which was precious, lost, and gone is still yet treasure, Platonic Ideal, eternal.

Mazeppa, Eroica, Wilde Jagd - each offers up plenty, I mean just plenty - of force, rhythm, otherwise. Yet Sherman really never seems in any danger of falling off his piano bench. He can ride the wild beasts, the storm thunder and lightning, the heroic-mythic story gesture which otherwise floods out volcanic enough to kill off the people of Pompeii instantly, in one fell swoop. This refusal to connote violence and destruction somehow leaves listeners connected to the serene Platonic Ideals, even when the music is fast, furious, and noisy indeed.

It seems this disc appears and disappears quickly from the commercial marketplaces. So if this sort of Liszt sounds like your sort of Liszt - even by way of contrast with the more typical Romantic Era Hysterics and Dramas which we often seem to discern in the composer as a sort of bursting the boundaries permission - then by all means go for a copy, soon.

I'm all for ... Five Stars.