Tausig/Liszt: Faust Symphony for solo piano (Lajkó) скачать в хорошем качестве

Tausig/Liszt: Faust Symphony for solo piano (Lajkó)

00:00 - Faust 29:34 - Gretchen 48:32 - Mephistopheles 1:07:50 - Chorus mysticus The 'Faust' Symphony has long been recognized as Liszt's greatest orchestral work and ranks with the pianoforte sonata and the oratorio Christus as the noblest of his musical achievements. Inspired by Goethe's eponymous play, Liszt did not attempt to follow the dramatic narrative, but presents instead portraits in music of the three principal protagonists of the drama. In general, Liszt has drawn on the first of Goethe's two plays, but he chose to set the chorus mysticus that ends the second play producing an inspired choral ending complete with a solo tenor and a grand organ. [...] The key-scheme of the work, revolving as it does around the augmented triad of C, E and A flat, seems to have been inspired both by Schubert's 'Wanderer' Fantasy and by the last three piano sonatas of Beethoven. (The idea is recapitulated in pieces as diverse as the first symphony of Brahms and the first piano concerto of Shostakovich!) The famous sequence of broken augmented triads at the opening of the piece are a very portent of the twelve-note row, and allow for enormous flexibility of tonality. Liszt had been pondering this for many years, and an array of album-leaves from the early 1840s, some of which are marked Prélude omnitonique, is testimony to his ever-enquiring mind. Faust's own forensic attempts at comprehension, whether of the physical world or the human condition, are aptly rendered in music. His moments of triumph are represented by the grand theme in E major, but even that becomes contemplative when it returns. The movement is in sonata-form, complete with a false recapitulation in the 'wrong' key before the true return in C minor of the principal theme. Although Liszt produced the whole symphony (and all of the Dante Symphony) for two pianos, Gretchen, the second movement of the Faust Symphony, is the only movement that he published in a version for solo piano: a pity, because he has done the job so beautifully, in exactly the same spirit in which he approached the transcriptions of the Beethoven Symphonies. The piece is a character portrait of Goethe’s heroine, cast in a simple ternary form. The main material is woven around two of Liszt’s finest themes, one a delicate melody with a single line of more florid accompaniment, and the other a theme whose opening chords reveal some splendid part-writing in the imitations of the inner voices. The music of the central section is effective enough without the need to have observed its origins in the first movement. Those who wish to follow all of the extra-musical possibilities would need to hear the whole Symphony, but as a single movement piano piece, the work does not stand in need of further gloss. The themes of Mephistopheles are a wonderfully inventive transformation of those of the first movement, now tinged with great malignity and mischief - a procedure followed years later by Bartók in his Two Portraits. One further theme - a chord accompanied by a trill, ending with two ominous knocks - is taken from Liszt's much earlier piece for piano and strings, known as Malédiction. Both the orchestral and two-piano versions of the symphony may be ended with this movement, where the themes of Gretchen and Faust emerge victorious, but Liszt really wanted his setting of Goethe's final chorus amidst an air of mystery that transforms itself into the most optimistic conclusion. [...] (notes by Leslie Howard) The monumental piano transcriptions of Liszt's only symphonies, the Faust and Dante, by Carl Tausig (1841-1871) must be ranked on equal footing with Liszt's own transcription of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Worked on while Tausig was still a young, eager disciple of Liszt, the writings can be found in abundance in many of his master's works of similar vein: some transitional passages are slightly extended, one or two cadenzas appeared here and there, and orchestral figurations are skillfully reinvented to be pianistic whilst still being faithful to the spirit of the original scores. Both works, like the piano solo version of the symphonic poems, were sadly neglected by Tausig himself, who did not see them through to a publication state in favor of his Wagner transcriptions. The state of the manuscripts is quite curious: while the Dante Symphony (located in the GSA in Weimar) is cleanly transcribed, with performance directions mostly written out, the Faust Symphony in the Liszt Budapest Museum is left somewhat unfinished and with virtually no instruction, prompting a dedicated editor to seek Liszt's own versions for two pianos for reference. (Liszt did use the manuscript of the second movement as the basis for his own arrangement, S.513.) Nevertheless, they remain fascinating entries in both composers' oeuvres, and hopefully these two score videos of mine can help bring back these two works to the table for discussion!