Liszt Trans. Etude 8 (recorded today) Unedited

[furiouzpianist]

Please tell me what you think. I am preparing for a recital in a month.

Please excuse the few additions that I made in the left hand (I play a full chord instead of an octave, sometimes.) Also, I added a tremolo at the end.

One take and unedited, as always. My old recording was around 5'20, now this is 5'00.

It takes me a great deal of effort to keep this piece in my fingers - chords are not my strong point. For me, this piece is much more difficult than Liszt Concerto No. 1, Rhapsody 9, or even the B minor Sonata. This piece happens to bring out all of my defects.

[liordavid]

brilliant playing. I would suggest that you make all of the beginning measures sound like they are all in 6 8ths as opposed to making it sound like switching from different time signatures.

[furiouzpianist]

in the 6/8 equal to 2/4?

I thought that thinking of it as 2/4 in a faster tempo makes it sounds more fluent. Lazar Berman actually adds an extra 8th here.

[pianist1976]

Good work! That's a really challenging piece, and you play it on tempo. You made it technically well (congrats for those ultra difficult jumps) and expressively also well. For the 1st bar octaves I also like more with more pedal (in your recording sounds a bit dry for me) but, as I said, that's only my taste. In the other way, I liked your work.

Talking about the great Lazar Berman, I think that you are playing the same measuring/counting mistake that he and others such as Cziffra made in this piece (bars 2-3 and similar ones). You must count the silences. The rhythm is similar to that in bar 59, except for the fact that in the opening you have some extra silences. But you made it sound as a binary measure (bad counted).

Otherwise, excellent work.

[furiouzpianist]

Many people told me this before, so I count in 2/4, and play the beats "in between". I worked this out with a metronome, so that each measure has a consistent number of beats. If you count 8ths, you add an extra beat.

Pisarenko plays the correct rhythm:

Cziffra and Berman add an extra beat. My absolute favorite for this piece is: Ovchinikov. Just super-human.

[pianist1976]

I don't want to sound pedantic (I never won Liszt competition as Pisarenko nor I'm a great pianist as Berman and Cziffra was) but Pisarenko also measures wrongly that rhythm. I don't know where the problem is but there are many great pianists who doesn't play this right (maybe is a non written interpretative tradition on this piece inherited from pianist to pianist?).

But there are exceptions. For example, Claudio Arrau measures and accentuates the piece as is written ;-)

Anyway, keep the good work. I think it's good.

[furiouzpianist]

ah, ok. I will record this piece again this week when I run through the whole 1st half of my recital. It will be on a Steinway.

1st half - Liszt HR 9, Valse Melancholique and Wilde Jagd.

[furiouzpianist]

here is the Ovchinikov recording. The greatest ever of this piece. STUNNING playing.