Liszt Années de Pèlerinage by Sheppard

Liszt resists reduction. That’s the first thing to say about any pianist who takes on both books of the Années de Pèlerinage — the whole sprawling, contradictory enterprise, from the Swiss water-colorism of Book I to the Italian paintings and the Petrarch fire of Book II. The temptation is either to inflate everything into Romantic bombast or to sand it all down into something polite and presentable. Craig Sheppard, recording at Seattle’s Meany Theater over two October days in 2011, does neither. What he offers instead is something rarer and, in the end, more interesting: a Liszt who thinks.

The linearity is the first thing you notice. Sheppard plays clean. He’s not interested in the grand rhetorical gesture, the thundercloud pedal, the pause that lingers just long enough to say I am a very serious artist. “La Chapelle de Guillaume Tell” comes at you fast — almost startlingly so — as if Sheppard has decided, right at the outset, to dismantle any expectation of Lisztian monumentality before it can take root. The pedal is sparing throughout, and the effect is clarifying rather than ascetic. You hear things.

“Le Lac de Wallenstadt” is suffused with genuine refinement. Not prettiness — refinement, which is different. The distinction matters because Liszt himself was trying to translate actual experience: these are places he traveled with the Countess d’Agoult in 1835 and 1836, and he was in love, and the Alps were real to him, and the water was cold. Sheppard honors that specificity.

“Vallée d’Obermann” is where things get complicated — where they always get complicated. This is the piece Liszt built around Senancour’s novel, the great Romantic document of paralyzed longing and cosmic self-pity, and it requires a pianist willing to inhabit a fairly extreme psychological state for something like fifteen minutes. Sheppard’s tempo is forward-moving, even urgent. He doesn’t have Lazar Berman’s sculptural grandeur — few pianists alive or dead have had that, the sense in Berman’s 1970s Melodiya recording that each phrase is being carved from something that was always there, waiting — but Sheppard does share something of the vital pulse you hear in Mordecai Shehori and, more surprisingly, in Aldo Ciccolini’s undervalued EMI traversal. He’s after the existential restlessness rather than the monument.

“Au bord d’une source” is more reflective than Horowitz’s old version, less pointed in its inflections. Whether that’s a deficit depends on what you want from the piece. I find I don’t mind it; the music can carry a certain dreaminess without collapsing into vagueness, and Sheppard keeps the texture alive.

Book II is where the stakes rise. “Sposalizio” — inspired by the Raphael painting in the Brera, the marriage of Mary and Joseph rendered in Liszt’s most luminous keyboard writing — builds here with real adeptness, the climax earned rather than imposed, the textual detail audible throughout without the pianist ever seeming to be pointing at it. That quality, the ability to illuminate without underlining, carries through the “Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa,” where the humor is genuinely pointed. This is not music that always gets its jokes told well.

The three Petrarch Sonnets are the crux. No. 47 starts a shade under-energized — Jorge Bolet on his old Baldwin LP and Earl Wild in live interpretation both generate more forward momentum from the opening bars — but Sheppard recovers, and the reading deepens. No. 104, by contrast, is outstanding: the initial agitation conveyed with real power, the emotional temperature more unsettled than either Horowitz or Bolet, which costs him something in overt nobility but gains something in psychological rawness. Sonnet 123 gets a taut, almost Wild-like tempo — arresting, slightly dangerous — and it works.

The Dante Sonata is distinguished throughout. Not a sentence I can say about every release of it. Sheppard’s technical command is matched by his structural understanding — he knows where the piece is going and he makes sure you know too, without telegraphing the architecture in advance. This is hard to do in a work that can easily tip into theatrical incoherence.

The Roméo label’s engineering is close — sometimes in this series a shade too close, catching the action of the Steinway — but not here. The piano sounds like itself: a Steinway, in a room, played by a human being.

Sheppard has recorded Liszt before, but nothing quite so wide-ranging as this. His approach won’t suit everyone. If you come to this music wanting the grand manner — the high romantic rhetoric of a Cziffra or the burnished seriousness of Berman at his most imperial — you’ll find Sheppard cool by comparison. But cool is not the same as cold, and direct is not the same as shallow. This is Liszt from the inside, thought through rather than performed at you. That’s worth a great deal.