Franz Liszt - Leslie Howard
I valzer

This magnificent disc inaugurates a very long cycle starring Mr. Leslie Howard: the gentleman in question has practically recorded the entire piano works of Franz Liszt, spread across about sixty CDs recorded over fifteen years. Certainly the greatest discographic tribute ever made for the Hungarian musician, one of the main protagonists of European Romanticism, an exceptional virtuoso and prolific composer.

In his production, not all that glitters is gold: a certain tendency towards note dispersion and outer gestures made to elicit applause lurks behind his creations (perhaps an inevitable consequence of his superhuman skill) and some of them sometimes exhaust themselves in the technical difficulty of the brilliant or sensational genre, but when he manages to find the balance between form and content, he reaches remarkable peaks. As in this case. His waltzes retain very little of their original dance wrapping, if it can be put this way: they are significantly deconstructed for expressive purposes. Starting with the most famous of the collection, the "Mephisto Waltz" placed at the end of the set, a truly fascinating run on the keyboard, which Howard never gets lost in, rather bringing it to completion with exquisite taste and superb technique.

But superb is also the performance on the "Forgotten Waltz No. 2", which opens the collection under review: surely the listener will be enchanted by the way Howard himself, after some exquisite harmonic excursions from which the color of the sound, the tone (to which Liszt has always paid great attention) emerges in all its beauty, dances on the instrument in actual waltz time!!! And if in the Chopin or Schubert waltzes, one can still glimpse the reflection of the Ancien Régime, and while listening, it really seems like attending a court dance of the nobility surrounding the kings and queens of that era, in Liszt's waltzes, in their expressive frenzy and their somewhat clumsy and disjointed progression, the social unrest triggered by the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century is perceptible, the upheavals that will lead to the defeat and definitive exit of the aforementioned Ancien Régime: here its farewell from History manifests on the notes of the"Little Album Leaf in Waltz Time", while the uncertainty of new times is expressed by the splendid "Bagatelle Without Tonality", and the arrival on the world stage of new subjects and social classes is revealed in the "Mephisto Waltz No. 3".

And this is precisely the beauty of Music: in its best expression, this form of art manages to cast a glance (through hearing!!!) at the world surrounding all of us, describing it better than a newspaper article or a television program ever could.

So, what are we waiting for? Let’s turn on the player and... enjoy the listening!!!