Berg, Janácek, Liszt: Precipitando

Album review

"Precipitando," precipitating, is an excellent title for this recital, which is dramatically better as a whole than as the sum of its parts. Each work, in the vision of pianist Dénes Várjon, is the precipitate, or perhaps the crystallization, of an experimental tradition that began with Liszt and continued in various forms through the Second Viennese School and the French Impressionists, whom Várjon considers manifestations of related rather than opposed impulses. Várjon's most novel take here is his way of looking at Liszt as a proto-modern, getting away from the rock-star image bequeathed by, among others, filmmaker Ken Russell. Instead, as Paul Griffiths puts it in his fine notes, Liszt was the "forerunner" of Strauss and Schoenberg "in matters for form because he was so in matters of harmony, a continuous, constantly evolving structure answering the needs of a harmonic style in which keys and key relationships can no longer be taken for granted." That description might apply to all three of the pieces on the album: the densely motivic and harmonically challenging Piano Sonata, Op. 1, of Berg, and even Janácek's In the mists, which pushes Debussy's Impressionism to the breaking point harmonically. You could find better recordings of any of these pieces individually; the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor may seem perfunctory for some listeners. Yet hearing the three works together in this way becomes a source of revelations, many of them concerning the fact that harmonic experimentation was never an end in itself for composers in the second half of the 19th century. An intelligent triumph of programming, and engineering as well.
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