Beethoven Symphonies (Liszt Transcriptions) – Martynov

There is something almost perverse about Liszt’s decision to transcribe all nine Beethoven symphonies for solo piano. He did it, he said, so that provincial music-lovers who would never hear an orchestra might know these scores intimately, at the keyboard, in the parlor. Few pianists have taken that populist premise and run it quite so far into interpretive territory as Yury Martynov does here, on an 1837 Erard whose tone — woody, slightly veiled in the tenor, startlingly resonant in the bass — tells you things about Liszt’s conception that a Steinway never could.

The Erard is the real discovery of this disc. Bass octaves don’t just thud; they ring, with a decaying sustain that lets Martynov voice inner lines modern pianists usually have to fake with pedal tricks. Listen to how the opening chords of the Seventh Symphony’s first movement breathe: there’s air between the attack and the resonance, something closer to how an orchestra’s basses and timpani would separate in a decent hall. Period-instrument Beethoven symphonies are old news by now. Period-instrument Liszt-Beethoven transcriptions are not.

The Seventh is the triumph here, and by some margin.

Martynov’s allegretto clocks in at 9:34. Kleiber takes it at 8:09, Karajan at 8:01 in his ‘62 cycle; both treat the movement’s ostinato as a march that must keep moving, lest Beethoven’s grief curdle into sentimentality. Martynov isn’t interested in that argument. He lets the piece sink into something closer to a funeral cortege glimpsed through fog, each repeated rhythmic cell weighted differently, the piano’s natural decay standing in for orchestral diminuendo in a way strings simply can’t replicate. The scherzo that follows dances with a lightness that almost makes you forget how glacial the previous eleven minutes were. His touch turns positively balletic, pedaling kept scrupulously clean, articulation crisp as a fortepiano should be.

The First Symphony is a different story, and not a happy one.

Here Martynov’s romantic instincts, honed in a career built largely around continuo playing and historically informed performance practice, work against the music rather than for it. The First is Beethoven still looking over his shoulder at Haydn, full of wit and Classical proportion; it wants crispness, a sense of comic timing, maybe even a little impatience. Instead we get expansiveness. The trio of the third movement is stretched into a hushed, heavily pedaled reverie that has almost nothing to do with the minuet-and-trio tradition it’s supposedly riffing on. The finale opens with pauses so long you start checking whether the disc has frozen — a device that works wonderfully in late Beethoven, or in Liszt’s own B minor sonata, but here just saps momentum from music that depends on forward motion to make its jokes land.

I kept thinking of Alfred Brendel’s remark that Beethoven’s early symphonies need “a twinkle in the eye.” Martynov’s twinkle has gone missing, replaced by a soft-grained seriousness more suited to the Ninth.

None of which should discourage anyone from seeking this disc out. The Seventh alone justifies the purchase. Virtuosity is never in short supply — the finale’s moto perpetuo figuration comes off cleanly, with a rhythmic snap that never curdles into mere note-spinning — but it’s the slower material where Martynov and his Erard really earn their keep. The booklet essay wanders into some unnecessary Freudian territory trying to explain Liszt’s compositional choices. Did the transcription really need a session on the couch? But the documentation of Liszt’s practical solutions, how he redistributes orchestral texture, where he thins material rather than attempting the impossible, is genuinely useful.

Recorded sound is warm, true to the instrument’s character, with none of the clangorous closeness that mars some fortepiano recordings. If this volume doesn’t quite match the vitality Martynov brought to his first installment in this series, blame the First Symphony, not the engineering or the instrument. The Seventh, though, belongs on the same shelf as the finest orchestral accounts: not as a curiosity but as a genuine alternative reading, one that uses the piano’s peculiar strengths to say something Kleiber and Karajan, for all their brilliance, simply couldn’t.