Liszt: Paganini Etudes Concert Etudes Ab Irato

Born in Verona in 1998, Giovanni Bertolazzi won the silver medal at the 2021 Liszt Piano Competition in Budapest, previous editions of which launched the careers of piano legends such as Annie Fischer and Dino Ciani. He has already made an enthusiastically received Liszt albums, and has established his credentials as a Liszt interpreter of rare insight and prodigious technique. On this album, his Piano Classics debut, Bertolazzi presents some of the most technically demanding and yet expressively wide-ranging works in the composer's vast output. Every serious Lisztian has measured up to the Paganini Etudes in the past, and Bertolazzi now joins their number. Within the course of the intricately interlinked six etudes of the Paganini cycle, we move from the Bachian, arpeggiated flourishes of the opening Tremolo, to the witty and allusive gestures of 'Octaves', and then the notoriously hair-raising leaps of 'La Campanella'. In these works, sublime virtuosity is always placed at the service of imagination, visual and literary almost as much as strictly musical. By the time Liszt had come to revise his earlier, even more testing version of the Paganini Etudes, finalising them in 1851 in the form familiar to us today, he had produced several more 'Concert Etudes', and the profound melancholy which afflicted his later years had begun to show through in a piece such as 'Un sospiro'. Liszt virtually invented the tone-poem or tone-painting as a musical genre, whether on the canvases of piano or orchestra. In Waldesrauschen we hear the activity of the forest - the fluttering of foliage, chirping of birds and so on - but even more we are transported into the mind of one who feels the crunch of every branch underfoot, fulfilling Beethoven's claim for his Pastoral Symphony that it was 'more the expression of feeling than tone-painting'. In the lesser-known 'Grande etude de perfectionnement', titled 'Ab irato', we sense the depths of Liszt's religious feeling, and the full measure of a profoundly Romantic sense of the scale between man and God, between heaven and hell, all within less than three minutes. The dryly entitled 'Concert Etudes' of Liszt thus plunge the listener into remarkably contrasting inner worlds.