Batsashvili Plays Liszt in Context of Chopin

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

Last summer Warner Classics released the latest solo piano album by Georgian pianist Mariam Batsashvili. The album was conceived to present several different aspects of the music of Franz Liszt, but one of those aspects involves his relationship with another pianist, Frédéric Chopin. That relationship is most explicit in the latter portion of the album, which couples études that Chopin composed for Liszt with études that Liszt composed for Chopin.

This is achieved by interleaving three of the twelve études from Chopin’s Opus 10 collection (the first in C major, the second in A minor, and the fourth in C-sharp minor) with two of the twelve Liszt études now cataloged as S. 137 (the ninth in A-flat major and the tenth in F minor). While this is an interesting programming device, I am not sure how much it tells us about the interactions across these two composers. If anything, I was reminded of how Anna Russell described the duet between Siegmund and Sieglinde in the first act of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre as “anything you can sing, I can sing louder.” In this case it is “however many notes you pile into an étude, I can pile more!”

More interesting are the tracks in which Batsashvili turns her attention to Liszt’s virtuoso approaches to transcription and arrangement. S. 480 is the set of Liszt’s six arrangements of selections from Chopin’s Opus 74 collection of nineteen Polish songs. Batsashvili plays all six of them in Liszt’s ordering. While there is no shortage of virtuoso display, the attentive listener will have no trouble identifying the themes of the songs themselves.

Individual selections from S. 480 used to be encore favorites. For my money, I wish I heard them more often; and, as far as I am concerned, the full collection is “worth the price of admission” for this album. They certainly make a deeper impression than Batsashvili’s decision to account for all six of the “Consolation” pieces or the opening track, “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude” (the blessing of God in solitude), the third of the ten pieces collection in the cycle that Liszt entitled Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (poetic and religious harmonies).

Mind you, all this is a reflection of personal bias. I tend to prefer Liszt’s transcriptions to his “original compositions” because, for the most part, he keeps those transcriptions close to the durational scale of the source content. Thus, I seldom find myself wondering how much longer the music will endure. The same can be said of Chopin, whose command of brevity consistently surpassed his efforts to work with longer durations. As a result, there are definitely tracks on Batsashvili’s new album that could not resonate better with my own listening habits; but there are also Liszt tracks that make it hard for me to avoid squirming!