Aart van der Wal reviews Ingrid Carbone’s third CD “Liszt: Le sentiment de la Nature”.
I dare not say that Franz Liszt is an underestimated composer, but I do say that nowadays too much emphasis is placed on the bombastic character of his music. It is evident that it bears the clear traces of it (it was not without reason that the Nazis used the beginning of Les Préludes for their weekly propagandistic war newsreel Die Wochenschau, which was a compulsory issue in all cinemas), but his oeuvre is too extensive and too diverse to be ignored. to do with that. I even count Liszt’s piano works among the most richly varied in Western piano literature with all the associated qualities, such as, in no particular order, the overwhelming, enchanting, energetic, virtuoso, contemplative, lyrical, inventive, majestic, sparkling, panoramic, poetic and passionate facets. which often take place within just a few bars. Then there are his equally inimitable late piano works with their refined sound language and which already provide an important advance on what would only unfold three decades later: the farewell to late Romanticism with the entrance of the free tonality, culminating in the Second Viennese School (which a century later is still considered ‘modern’).
«That is not a question of ‘exactly as it should be’ (that would destroy the imagination after all!), but a completely successful search for the degree of freedom that gives this music new impulses.»
«I have carefully assured myself, the score agrees with her.»
«This is no longer a question of just ‘playing beautifully’, but of interpreting from one’s own, carefully constructed musical vocabulary in conjunction with acquired knowledge and expertise.»