Thank you for the comments.
I might start learning the 4th movement soon, but probably not more than that at the moment. Btw, what 8 performances are there? The only ones I've heard of are Idil Biert and Leslie Howard.
Bruno Mezzena: 1976 - played Liszt's transcription
Francois-Rene Duchable: 1979 - played a transcription that was mostly his own (though it is credited as Liszt)
Idil Biret: 1979 - played mostly Liszt (changed some things)
Leslie Howard: 1990 - Liszt's transcription as part of the Complete Liszt series
Nikolai Petrov: 1991 - plays a transcription that's 95% Liszt and 5% his own but takes pretty much all the credit for it
Idil Biret: 1992 - a different recording than the 1979 one. This is the one that's on the Naxos CD. Mostly Liszt, but more changes this time than in 1979.
Pierre Reach: 1993 - mostly Liszt
Todd Crow: 2001 - all Liszt
Most of these are pretty easy to come by, except for Bruno Mezzena and Biret 1979. Both of those I could only find on record, in the stock of different European record dealers, who only had one each, after months of searching. Duchable I could only find in CD form in a 3-disc compilation called "The Young Duchable." That last one, by the way, is the absolute best out of all of them, hands down.
If you want to see the depths of an unhealthy obsession with this piece and the different recordings on piano, plus notes on my own workings of a piano arrangement, check out my livejournal dedicated exclusively to it.
https://op14.livejournal.com/if you start from the earliest entry it's more interesting, I guess.
shameless plug: a live recording of me doing mvt. 4 last year
https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php/topic,16498.0.html About yours: at around 2:19 you make the change that everybody who plays this on piano makes except for those who play exclusively Liszt's transcription. Liszt made his arrangement based on an early version of the Symphonie, which had been performed orchestrally in that form by the time Liszt got to it. Liszt treated the Symphonie with the most respect he'd ever shown in a transcription by that point and didn't include any new material, just creative ways of dealing with the orchestration and part writing.
The chromatic ideas that are present during the "Idee Fixe" statement in mvt. 2 in Liszt's transcription, at the time I mentioned above, are actually how the orchestra parts were written. Berlioz later revised it to include fragments of the mvt. 2 theme, possibly to make it sound like it fits in better with the movement (because, honestly, it doesn't really feel like it belongs there, or in any movement except 1.) Pianists are stuck between honoring Liszt's intentions and presenting a transcription of an early version, or reworking the parts that Berlioz later updated so that listeners who are familiar with the orchestral version won't wonder "why is that in there?" Personally, I'd be likely to update the text if I had the capacity as a pianist to play Liszt's transcription at all.
It's interesting that in the sleeve notes to Leslie Howard's recording he mentions that they were considering updating the transcription for the recording, but that the part in mvt. 2 would have been too drastic a change from Liszt. Thankfully, they decided to keep all of Liszt's text (which seems like it would have been a foregone conclusion, given the series.)
I e-mailed Todd Crow and asked him (among other things) what the most difficult parts of Liszt's transcription are, and one of the items he mentioned was the finale to mvt. 2. The LH octaves and RH leaps are two things that keeps me from playing this mvt. Good job on both of those.
and as a P.S., there are no other solo piano arrangements of this piece. Liszt's is the only one, and Otto Singer arranged mvts. 2 and 4 for piano four hands. Also, Liszt later re-transcribed the 4th movement, and it's pretty different from the one you find in the complete Symphonie transcription. If you find any clue that it has been transcribed or recorded somewhere that I'm not aware of, please let me know. I also have a two-page music sheet from the 1920's of a couple tunes from mvt. 2 for piano solo (in the key of G.) That one doesn't count.
Topic: Berlioz/Liszt: Symphonie Fantastique - II - Un Bal