Liszt Symphonic Poems (Stradal Transcriptions) – Marin

There is something almost perverse about August Stradal’s project — take Liszt’s orchestral tone poems, already the product of a pianist’s imagination scaled up by Joachim Raff’s orchestrating hand, and squeeze them back down onto eighty-eight keys. A round trip. But Stradal, who studied with Liszt in the composer’s last years and absorbed the old wizard’s harmonic thinking at close range, understood something important: this music was conceived at the keyboard even when it ended up in the brass. He was restoring these scores to their native element, not merely reducing them.

Risto-Matti Marin, continuing what promises to be a landmark traversal for Toccata Classics, plays this repertoire as though he believes every note of it. Frankly, that’s the only way to play it convincingly.

Orpheus opens the disc in a haze of arpeggiated half-light, and Marin resists the temptation to hurry through what is essentially an extended reverie. He lets the sustain pedal do quiet, unglamorous work here — long washes of sound that in Liszt’s orchestral original depend on divided strings and harp, but which on the piano acquire a different, more interior kind of glow. Barely twelve minutes long, it is the least bombastic thing on the disc, and Marin’s touch, soft-grained and unhurried, suits its wounded lyricism.

Tasso is the meatier proposition. Liszt’s slow introduction, based on a Venetian gondolier’s tune he claimed to have heard sung on the Grand Canal, unfolds here as something genuinely hypnotic. Marin draws the tempo out until the pulse nearly disappears, then lets the “Lamento” gather itself into the “Trionfo” with real cumulative logic. Twenty-one minutes is a long time to sustain that arc on solo piano without orchestral color to help disguise the seams. Marin’s sense of harmonic direction, where the music is going and why, carries it.

Then Hungaria, all strutting dotted rhythms and verbandas gone slightly feral. This is Liszt at his most nationalistically unbuttoned, and Stradal’s transcription does not flinch from the orchestral original’s occasional vulgarity. If anything it revels in it. The bagpipe drone near the close, rendered as a kind of stubborn ostinato hammered out in the middle register while filigree spins above, sounds more outlandish on piano than it ever did in the pit. Marin has the mastery for the double-note passagework and, better, the nerve to let it sound a little unhinged.

Hamlet closes the program in genuinely disturbing fashion. This is late Liszt in all but date: dark-hued, chromatically restless, kin to the Mephisto pieces and to Totentanz in its clenched-jaw fury. Marin finds the Ophelia music’s fragile tenderness without sentimentalizing it, and unleashes real violence in the climaxes. Good pianism. More than that, good dramaturgy — he understands that this is character study disguised as tone poem.

One keeps thinking, listening to this disc, of the old debate over whether these scores even need an orchestra. Haitink’s Philips cycle, for all its polish, often left me checking my watch; Solti brought some welcome adrenaline; Masur split the difference. None of them quite solved the problem of Liszt’s sometimes threadbare orchestration, that tendency toward doubled lines and foursquare brass chorales that can sound merely loud rather than compelling. Stradal’s piano versions sidestep the issue entirely. Density and transparency become matters of voicing and pedal rather than instrumentation, and a good pianist can shape them with a flexibility no maestro quite manages.

Sound is close and detailed, perhaps a shade dry in climaxes, but this suits music that thrives on clarity of inner voices rather than reverberant wash. Malcolm Macdonald’s booklet essay, characteristically erudite, is worth reading twice.

Three volumes in — or is it two, with a third promised — and the case for Stradal’s cycle, and for Marin as its advocate, is already well made. I find myself hoping Toccata lets him loose on Stradal’s Bruckner transcriptions next; a solo-piano Eighth Symphony sounds like exactly the kind of gloriously improbable undertaking this pianist was built for. Until then, this volume is required listening for anyone who thought they knew these tone poems and didn’t.