Another Tenor Volume in Hyperion’s Liszt Project

from Amazon.com

This Friday Hyperion will release the fifth volume of pianist Julius Drake’s project to record the complete songs of Franz Liszt. While I do not yet have a definitive source, the current estimate from Hyperion is that the project will conclude with the seventh volume. Each volume has been a single CD featuring a single vocalist. The vocalist on the new release is tenor Allan Clayton making this the second album presenting a tenor. (The first was the very first volume in the series with Drake accompanying Matthew Polenzani.) As is usually the case, this new album is currently available for pre-order from Amazon.com.

What continues to interest me about this series is the insight it provides in how Liszt the pianist approaches another genre. That approach is most evident when the basic musical structure is common to both a song and a solo piano composition, as is the case with the Petrarch sonnet movements from the Italian “year” of Années de Pèlerinage. In this new release the connections to piano works are less explicit. Nevertheless, anyone familiar with the canon of piano solos will recognize any number of familiar tropes in the piano accompaniment to the vocal lines.

At the same time we should bear in mind that Liszt composed a generous number of solo piano transcriptions of the songs of Franz Schubert. Even when the embellishments in these transcriptions threaten to go overboard (or actually do so), there is a clear sense that Liszt was clearly aware of all the nuts-and-bolts involved when Schubert set a poem to music. Those better informed than I can probably single out individual Liszt songs and then identify the extent to which Liszt drew upon one or more Schubert songs to serve as models.

As one who, thanks to an ambitious piano teacher, has had more contact with Liszt’s piano music than many would feel was reasonable, I have to say that familiarity with the composer’s tropes makes for a very satisfying listening experience. Indeed, in terms of Liszt’s pursuit of other genres, I feel there is far more to be gained from listening to these songs than from the breadth of his orchestral writing. Thus, while there is no shortage of expressiveness in either the music itself or the vocalists’ interpretation of that music, I have yet to feel that Liszt ever jumps in at the deep end, so to speak, they way he does in many (most?) of his symphonic poems. One might say that this is Liszt for those who are curious about the composer but would like to get away from the excesses found in his approach to keyboard embellishment or the repurposing of those excesses in orchestral settings.