If you knew what I meant, why bother commenting or do you have nothing better to do?
My Liszt comment was in referrence to the video piece. Perhaps I should have said "It's like listening to some Liszt." if that fills your boots.
BTW, I do like some of his works.
I happen to believe that john11inch had good reaason to "bother commenting"; irrespective of whether you meant to refer to some rather than all of Liszt's works, you nevertheless wrote of "lots of fury but little emotional content", which simply does not stand up to scrutiny on a number of levels.
Firstly, your suggestion appears to be that "fury" is somehow synonymous with "empty virtuosity", whatever that may mean, so your terminology is at best either flawed or misleading or both. "Furioso" is, of course, a well-known performance direction and we likewise all know what is signified by "con bravura"; john11inch appears to haver sought to help you out here by bringing the term "virtuosity" into the arena although, in so doing, he was clearly referring only to the kinds of virtuosity that one customarily associates with bravura playing - rapid-fire passage-work, octaves, volleys of chords, wide leaps, and so on - there are other kinds of mental virtuosity as well, such as may be found in abundance, for example, in some of the Chopin/Godowsky Studies where the requirements for hand-eye co-ordination and the judicious balancing of lines represent an extreme kind of virtuosity that is often a good deal less obvious to the untrained listener than the kinds of physical virtuosity to be found among Liszt's Transcendental Studies, Hungarian Rhapsodies, operatic parphrases, etc.
Secondly, even the former kinds of virtuosity do not always signify or call for "furioso" treatment (a sense of control is, after all, mandatory in the successful presentation of such virtuosity, whereas john11inch's definition of "fury" is rightly suggestive of such control being undermined).
Thirdly - and this is where I seek to address what seems to be the principal problem with your statement - your suggestion that "fury" and, by implication, physical virtuosity (i.e. a certain kind of advanced mécanique rather than the much broader "technique"
per se), are invariably synonymous with a paucity or utter lack of "emotional content", which is nonsense; of course any composer with sufficient technical knowledge of piano writing can string together empty, vapid "virtuoso" passages that might be devoid of
any worthwhile content, emotional or otherwise, but then Liszt, Alkan and others could and did write music requiring the same pianistic faculties but imbued with real substance. Your statement therefore suggests a severely blinkered, monochromatic, dogmatic viewpoint; whether or not it may have been fuelled wholly or in part by reason of the fact that you are not especially fond of much of Liszt's work is neither here nor there, since that is your personal view, whereas your statement about "little or no emotional content" purports to be factual (which, as I hope to have demonstrated, it is not).
Best,
Alistair
Topic: Fazil Say - Paganini Variations