Liszt Piano Showpieces – Vanessa Benelli Mosell

Vanessa Benelli Mosell can play the piano. That much is beyond argument within thirty seconds of the “Grand Galop Chromatique,” which she dispatches with an evenness of octave technique that would have satisfied even Liszt’s most exacting pupils — the ones who complained, decades later, that nobody played the old wizard’s music with the requisite abandon anymore. She has abandon. What she doesn’t always have, on this disc, is a reason.

That’s the trouble with an all-transcription, all-showpiece program. It lives or dies on personality, on the sense that somebody is actually saying something through all that filigree, rather than just executing it very cleanly. Liszt himself never played this repertoire “straight.” Contemporary accounts describe him bending tempo wildly, improvising cadenzas that weren’t on the page, treating a piece like the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in C-sharp minor as a springboard rather than a script. Cziffra understood this in his bones, partly because he’d spent years playing gypsy fiddle-tunes in Budapest cafés before Paris ever heard of him. Jenő Jandó, in his old Naxos cycle, found a different route to the same freedom — unshowy on the surface, but full of rubato that breathes like speech. Benelli Mosell, by comparison, plays the notes.

And there are a great many notes to play. The four rhapsodies chosen here — Nos. 6, 10, 11, 12 — cover a lot of ground, from the stomping csárdás energy of No. 6 to the odd, almost impressionistic textures of No. 11, and she articulates the fioriture with real cleanliness. But cleanliness isn’t the same as wit, and this music is fundamentally witty, full of mock-heroic gestures, exaggerated sentiment, Lisztian winks. I kept waiting for a wink. It didn’t come.

The “Capriccio alla Turca,” built on themes lifted from Beethoven’s incidental music to The Ruins of Athens, ought to be great fun — Liszt at his most puckish, turning Beethoven’s faux-exotic march into a circus of hand-crossings and glittering scales. Here the engineering does her no favors. The climactic fortissimo chords distort audibly, a harsh, papery crackle that no amount of pianistic security can charm away. It’s a pity, because underneath the distortion there’s evidence of a pianist who really can voice a big chordal texture without banging.

Elsewhere the results are pleasant without cutting terribly deep. “La Leggierezza” has the requisite feather-light passagework — Liszt asks for lightness in the title and gets it, more or less, though the phrasing sits a shade foursquare where it wants to float. The “Liebestraum” in A-flat, that most over-familiar of Liszt’s salon confections, comes off politely, prettily, and without much sense of the poem, Freiligrath’s “Love as long as you are able,” that supposedly stands behind the music. It needs to sound improvised, unbuttoned, a little dangerous even in its tenderness. Instead it sounds rehearsed. Competently rehearsed, but rehearsed.

The two galops and the Rossini-derived “La Danza” are the closest thing to pure circus on the program, and here her fingers really do dazzle. The “Galop Russe” rattles along with terrific bravura, all glissandi and octave leaps landed dead center. But “La Danza” wants more dynamic shading than it gets. Rossini’s tarantella rhythm needs devilish little accents, sudden hushed asides, and what we get instead is mezzo-forte from start to nearly finish, a kind of bright uniform sheen.

None of this is bad playing. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The octaves are true, the fingerwork is immaculate, the sense of pulse never falters even in the most treacherous passagework of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 10. But an hour of virtuosity without much interpretive personality behind it starts to feel like watching someone execute a flawless dive from the ten-meter board, over and over, always sticking the landing, never once making you gasp.

Compare Cziffra’s visceral, half-mad account of these rhapsodies, or Jandó’s unfussy poetry, and Benelli Mosell’s reading feels efficient rather than inhabited. I admire the artistry enormously. I just wish somebody, at some point across sixty-some minutes, had surprised me.