Liszt

Lise de la Salle is a 23-year-old French pianist who has been making quite a splash. In 2005 I reviewed an early CD of her playing music by Bach and Liszt, recorded when she was sixteen, and felt she was someone to watch Lise de la Salle plays Bach, Liszt . I heard her in a 2007 recital and then reviewed a CD of the recital program Piano Works by Mozart & Prokofiev [includes DVD] in which I praised her potential, wrote of concern about some bothersome mannerisms, and suggested she needed some further maturity. I was not prepared, though, to be as bowled over as I have been by the current CD devoted to piano music of Liszt. This disc is, in a word, sensational.

It opens with a very romantic and yet structurally coherent account of the Dante Sonata ('Après une lecture du Dante'), the last piece in the Italian year of the 'Années de Pèlerinage'. This is as satisfying a performance of this notoriously difficult-to-put-across quasi-sonata as I've ever heard. It depicts with ferocious intensity Dante's descent into Hell and ends with a consolatory, even triumphant passage with evanescent trills. Gorgeous!

Liszt's transcription of the 'Lacrymosa' from Mozart's Requiem follows and serves as an emotional balm after the over-the-top Dante Sonata. Then on to a convincing reading of another of Liszt's latish 'big pieces', the 'Ballad No. 2 in B Minor', which is in a way a companion to the Dante Sonata in its disparate parts somehow melded together by Liszt. Then another transcription, this time the rewriting of Schumann's lovely song 'Widmung' ('Dedication') which is for some reason called only 'Liebeslied' in the CD booklet. 'Liebeslied' is indeed the subtitle for Liszt's piece, but it is always known by Schumann's song title. In any event, de la Salle plays it tenderly, emphasizing the song's utter lyricism but not neglecting the high emotion of its peroration.

You can begin to see that the program so far has been arranged thus: high drama - songfulness - high drama - songfulness. The pattern continues with de la Salle's performance of the highly virtuosic and dramatic 'Mazeppa' from the 'Transcendental Études'. This performance makes ones hair stand on end for its extraordinary élan. A classic performance that takes its place among the greatest ever recorded.

'Nuages gris' ('Gray Clouds') is an ethereal work that presages musical developments of the early twentieth century. It uses scraps of motivic material clothed in almost atonal subjectivity. De la Salle uses appropriate clinical clarity in her performance, leading us to understand that in this very late work (1881) Liszt sheds earthly drama for something 'beyond'. It leads to a serene performance of Liszt's transcription of Schubert's beloved 'Ständchen' ('Serenade'), a song in which the singer pleads softly for his lover to make him happy. De la Salle emphasizes the lyricism until the final burst of emotion from the singer.

'Funerailles' (1849) (from 'Harmonies poétiques et religieuses') is probably in memory of Chopin whose death had occurred just a week or so before its composition. It is often played with unalloyed sadness, but in de la Salle's performance one also hears anger, anguish. I've sometimes thought the 12-minute-long 'Funerailles' outstays its welcome, musically, but did not have this feeling during this performance. De la Salle weaves a narrative arc for the piece that is convincing.

Finally we have Liszt's great transcription of Wagner's 'Liebestod', the final soprano aria ('Mild und leise') from 'Tristan und Isolde', an orchestral-and-voice work that only a genius or crackpot would dare attempt to transcribe for piano. Obviously I think Liszt was a genius. This work has had marvelous recorded performances, including the classic by Horowitz, and while I think Horowitz is superior in some respects to de la Salle's, she sustains the Liebestod's lyricism for almost two minutes longer than Horowitz, a breathtaking feat of romantic pianism.

Lise de la Salle has come into her own. She will almost certainly be one of the important pianists of our era.

Scott Morrison

This is going to be a review of a different sort, which I hope will be read in place of automatically punching the Unhelpful button. It's aimed at anyone who loves this CD unreservedly or not. At this point my feeling about de la Salle is that she belongs among very promising young virtuosos like Yundi, Lang Lang, Yuja Wang, and a few others without achieving a special voice, as none of them has, either.

There are still a few influential voices among music reviewers amid the general chatter, and Bryce Morrison's rave for Lise de la Salle, which reinforces his early enthusiasm for her, will go a long way; so in the smaller world of Amazon will Scott Morrison's strong review. De la Salle is part of the seemingly endless procession of rising French pianists, an astonishing phenomenon given the near absence of French virtuosos on the international scene for decades. Now they are numerous enough to stand against the bulwark of Russians, with Americans far behind except for our older established stars like Ax and Perahia. At 23, de la Salle ticks off the boxes of modern pianistic careerism: she's young, photogenic (even kittenish), possessed of impeccable technique, and well-grounded in the musical fundamentals.

The two Morrisons also hear greatness, both being bowled over by de la Salle's new Liszt recital. The pluses leap out of the loudspeakers. The piano she's playing is very good and has been recorded beautifully. It is sonorous, powerful, and without excessive percussiveness. The liveliness of the sound and the breadth of the soundstage augment the pianist's own brightness and boldness of approach. Anyone who can play the Dante Sonata and Mazeppa without banging is to be admired; more importantly, the pianist raises both works above the level of theatrical claptrap. De la Salle doesn't make the mistake of charging at these showpieces with hammers swinging. And as Scott Morrison points out, varying loud forceful Liszt with softer, songful Liszt is good pacing, since a certain amount of exhaustion is built into Liszt's headlong dazzlement. We need to clear our head of thousands of notes before the next thousand arrive.

I'm not building up to a huge "but...." here. De la Salle, at a very young age, can claim to walk with Cziffra, if not Horowitz. But I don't consider Liszt's music as unalloyed genius; there's an enormous amount of claptrap and barnstorming, and when you clear out the thicket of sixteenth notes, banal tunes and harmonies abound, along with aimless sprawl instead of structure, much less true development. Since I hold this view, to me a great Lisztian must recreate the music, adding enough refinement, musicality, and personal artistry to make the music better than it actually is. Who can do that? My pantheon would include Richter, Horowitz, Nelson Freire, the little Liszt recorded by Argerich and Pollini, along with episodes of inspiration from Kissin, Berman, Grimaud, Volodos, and Cziffra. The single greatest Lisztian I've ever encountered, however, is the Russian Grigory Ginzburg, much less known in the West, who achieves the ultimate in bringing out Liszt's virtues and erasing his sins.

That's a fairly long list, and of course it names some giants of modern pianism. De la Salle is doing more than rattling off these knuckle-crunchers, but for me she doesn't yet penetrate into them in a transformative way. I hear big gestures and small gestures, but I was never really moved. (Listen to Volodos playing the Dante Sonata in concert form Vienna on Sony and you'll hear the difference.) The song transcriptions are short, but I was bored before they ended. The Liebestod transcription is claptrap filled with dog-eared tremolos and arpeggios, and de la Salle does little to uplift it through magical phrasing. She's tasteful and a bit generic. Go to the much sneered-at Lang Lang's Liszt; it has far more character.

It's a tough assignment to be moved by Liszt, as opposed to being wowed. I can think of pianists in the young and youngish generation who show me more promise in this area (not that they all play Liszt), including Anderszewski, Biss, Denk, Lugansky, Blechacz, perhaps Fliter, Matsuev, Ott, and Trpceski. It helps that I've heard the majority of them in concert, since that's the telltale experience, not recordings. There are also some as yet obscure competition winners who may soon soar, especially Yulianna Avdeeva.

Which isn't to gainsay de la Salle's ability to rise above the virtuoso pack. By any measure she and her cohorts are amazing technically, and she has the virtue of not being coarse or empty. But when she plays things I've heard dozens of times, like Widmung, Standchen, Mazeppa, et al., I don't hear the "it" that marks inspired musicianship. De la Salle will have a big career, no doubt. We'll see if she's ever spoken of the way Pollini and Argerich are.