Liszt: Complete Piano Music Vol. 45 - 12 Grandes études

Jin, Wenbin

8.573709

Seldom performed in the concert hall, this Forty-fifth edition in the complete piano music of Franz Liszt contains the original 1837 version of the Douze Grandes Etudes. Though Liszt later asked that this should not be played, as it had been superseded by a later version, it appears as part of his catalogued works, and Leslie Howard was, a couple of decades ago, to record it for the first time as part of his complete Liszt cycle. Composed when he was just twenty-six, it shows that he was a pianist who could perform the most preposterously difficult feats of dexterity that the score encompasses.
Move to more recent times and the level of achievement by today’s virtuosos has lifted technical possibilities to new levels, though I guess the Chinese-born pianist, Wenbin Jin, needed the four days over which the disc was recorded to achieve the perfection we hear and enjoy. After a brief finger-warming opening etude, the studies grow in length and complexity, Liszt tantalising the listener by writing in a way that makes you believe three hands are involved. Much of the work depends on dexterity, but as we hear in the Third and Sixth study, it was equally an exercise in creating long lyric lines that had become possible by the modern pianos of the Liszt era.
Maybe if we lived in a fantasy world Jin’s left hand would seem to be less rhythmically precise as it works furiously to create the ‘accompaniment’ to the melody in the right hand. But listen to him thrillingly surmount the incredible difficulties in the mercurial Eighth and Tenth study, or the massive climax to the Eleventh, and you may consider that comment as being most ungrateful. The engineer had the unenviable choice of a warm or a dry tone to help inner clarity. He opted for warmth. • David Denton, David's Review Corner, March 2017

CD x 1

Naxos

3/1/17

0747313370979