Word: liszt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Directions '63 (ABC, 2-3 p.m.). "The Passion and Resurrection," Part 4 of Franz Liszt's oratorio, Christus...
...Liszt: Concerto No. 1, Les Preludes (New York Philharmonic. Leonard Bernstein, conductor; Andre Watts, pianist; Columbia) confirms the astonishing first impression that 16-year-old Pianist Watts made in his New York debut in January. Watts and Bernstein are in rapport in a fluent and subtle performance...
...piece is one of Liszt's grandest, but it is dull in most performances. It is long and has no easily graped structure; apparently, a pianist with the technique and imagination of Horowitz is needed to tie its stretched out variations together...
Cramped by tradition, Liszt insisted on writing a full-length sonata without sonata form, without movements, and with no more than a bare minimum of thematic material. The stuff of his piece is virtually over in the first fifteen measures: the introduction, a meditative, decending scale in the piano's lower registers, then the main theme, crashing, acrobatic octaves followed by a tiny march, again down...
...into a simple song, the march is played at half speed, decorated with trills, and, near the end, the two halves of the main theme are juxtaposed in a fugue. Of the four or five pianists I've heard perform this work, Horowitz is the only one who masters Liszt's runs of octaves and sixths enough to make the composer's intentions clear throughout. No matter how intricate the notes on top are, the lower levels are never blurred. In Liszt's day, probably, it was fashionable to play the piece with less precision, but Horowitz's precision...