Andrea Bedetti reviews Ingrid Carbone’s third CD “Liszt: Le sentiment de la Nature” on MusicVoice.
Artistic 4,5/5
Technical 4/5
If there is a phrase capable of summarizing the life and work of Franz Liszt in a few, very few words, it is probably the one that the Hungarian composer and pianist himself uttered a few years before his death, when he had stopped performing in public: « Love saved me from myself, art saved me from love, religion saved me from art. Because everything passes, except God.” Life, therefore, with all its enticements and its renunciations, with its temptations and its expiations, as a continuous act of salvation, of remission, of purification; an act, for Liszt, which from time to time was implemented through a sentimental, artistic, spiritual planning. A continuous recourse to something else, like a sort of longed-for transference with which to find comfort, be it feminine curves, the keyboard of a piano or the stave of a score or again, or better said, finally, like a alter ego of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the feet of a cross.
Thus, Liszt’s alpha and omega correspond to eros on the one hand and to the spirit on the other, passing through the bridge of art. Anyone who has read the confessions of Angela da Foligno or John of the Cross knows perfectly well that sensuality sometimes does not rhyme with carnality, but with spirituality, since sooner or later opposites are destined to touch and recognize each other. Therefore, performing and, at the same time, listening to Liszt’s music, starting with his piano music, fundamentally means expressing and receiving two apparently contrasting forces: the call of the transcendent (of which the call of nature is a testimony that goes far beyond a ‘insufficient idea of mere pantheism) and that of an immanence which involves, more or less constantly throughout the life of the Hungarian pianist and composer, this evident search for a sensuality capable of cloaking the artist’s external gaze.
«Ingrid Carbone performs with participation, dosing the tone of the Steinway used and translating it into a continuous search for crystallinity, to be understood as an expression of purity, transparency, immaculate vision that is released in the ears of the listener. […] Ingrid Carbone’s pianism moves, now with passion, now with consternation, between bewilderment and pseudo-will to power».
