for the piano #2: Beethoven vs. Liszt vs. Schumann

Try mephisto 3 and valse oubliee 3. They are in volume one of the Hyperion series.

xelab mentioned the boulez/barenboim edition of the liszt piano concertos in another thread

for whatever reason i completed missed this but it is excellent and also includes a relatively rare recording (certainly rare by the standards of yr barenboim types) of one of the valses oublieés

Errr I never heard of this either. This is a new recording on DG or somesuch?

This would be the only example I know of boulez conducting liszt other than live captures of him doing the Legend of St Elizabeth oratorio during his ny Phil tenure...

Which oubliee? Would love if you said #3.

The latest cliched piano classic I've been rediscovering through my daughter is the Moonlight Sonata, so amazing.

'A flower between two abysses' said someone or other

Hard piece to make tell. My favorite by far is rudolf serkin for that.

apparently lizst said that

I'm giving the Barenboim 8/14/23 on EMI a first listen now, great so far.

here's a neat thing about that sonata: beethoven's pedal markings for the first movement are pretty much unplayable with the overtone-rich long-toned modern concert grand. He indicated that the sustain pedal should be depressed pretty much the whole movement. On a modern piano this results in a total mess. But on a historical fortepiano you can follow his pedal indications and it sounds really cool. Look up Malcolm Bilson's recording.

My favorite discs of the big name beethoven sonatas are the R Serkin and Ivan Moravec ones. Both of them play those three. They are pretty much polar opposites style wise: gruff, craggy, rhetorical vs pearlescent, sparkling, almost hypnagogic clarity

http://i.imgur.com/3r5ZgWu.jpg

this is highly recommended

I'm going to finally have a decent pair of speakers in my office as of tomorrow, I'll keep an eye out for that Liszt disc

That is one of the great 'mixtape' style liszt recitals. See also the disc arnaldo Cohen recorded as volume 1 in Naxos complete Liszt series.

jon i dont think i heard this before but the cohen album is indeed excllent

Yup. Such a cool mix of the demonic-fiery and the demonic-twilit. Cohen is or was last time I checked the chairman of the British liszt society

I'm inclined to agree with András Schiff when he describes the second movement of this as one of the wonders of mankind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccyHT1sFmsg

Yep there are a good dozen movements from late beethoven that I have to write off as miracles (current fave: the concluding fugue mvmt of op 110)

I've never found a wholly satisfying recording of op. 111/i. I largely think the Schnabel quote about the sonatas being too great to be performed is bs but maybe it applies to this mvmt. There's def some kind of 'haptic gap' thing going on, the pianist's performance and my experience as a listener always fall short of what I can sense is really going on.

listening to Eric La Sage's recording of some of the later-era Schumann music for the yutes (die jugend) -- not sure I will ever get tired of this stuff. Schumann has a favorite phrasing, almost like a 2 bar joke, followed by a 2 bar punchline, which for whatever reason, didn't hit me on the head until today. Now, I hear it all over his music, and although that kind of rigid symmetry could be annoying, with him, it's a very comfy up-down-up-down.

might start figuring out what the deal is w/ schumann

Leif Ove Andsnes's EMI disc with the 1st Piano Sonata and the Fantasie did it for me. Especially the latter.

Highly highly recommend reading the Schumann parts of Charles Rosen’s The Romantic Generation, never has writing about music unlocked a specific composer so well for me

Beethoven has too many stone-cold classic piano moments to be denied, his best work is head-and-shoulders above the other two composers. That said, there is A LOT of it, and a lot of it just doesn't float my boat. The most annoying thing he does is when he goes V-I! V-I! V-I-V-I-V-I! and other variants of a similar aesthetic, this kind of over-insistence; this is what keeps me from truly adoring this composer. I love Waldstein, though.

Liszt I'm not especially familiar with, the piano pieces I know are somewhat trifling in an appealing way, or saccharine in quality. I don't know the major works at all and I'd be interested in recommendations.

Schumann is very, very curious indeed. I play Fantasiestucke at home pretty regularly, and I'm taken aback at how the most marvellous writing can suddenly detour into bizarre babbling. "Aufschwung" in particular has the greatest first two pages in the piano repertoire and then the most banal B-section I could imagine, which trails off into this over-long sinister bore of a section that I have always attributed to "this is where the composer got drunk".

Chopin mops the floor with all three of these guys, he is the greatest of all the piano composers and there is no disputing it. I would even tentatively rate Ives higher than Beethoven for Concord alone, it's my favourite piano piece of all time, except for the fact that it is unapproachably difficult (at least, to me).

Liszt I'm not especially familiar with, the piano pieces I know are somewhat trifling in an appealing way, or saccharine in quality. I don't know the major works at all and I'd be interested in recommendations.

The late pieces are where it's at. Cédric Tiberghien's Années de pèlerinage, troisième année & other late works, which came out earlier this year, makes for a solid primer, but my single most cherished Liszt piano recital may well be Krystian Zimerman's for DG, featuring the Piano Sonata, Nuages gris, La lugubre gondola, Funérailles and La notte.

Chopin mops the floor with all three of these guys, he is the greatest of all the piano composers and there is no disputing it.

listening to a "Liszt in Hungary" set that's got other stuff inc. a really biff-bam-pow Carl Maria von Weber piece and in drops Chopin, Mazurka in B Minor, and he's just...so fine.