Romantic Piano Masters - Batsashvili - Audio CD (Arrives in 50 days)

The music of Liszt is especially close to Mariam Batsashvili’s heart. It takes pride of place on her second Warner Classics album, devoted in the main to evocative, technically formidable piano transcriptions of opera, song and organ music. Speaking of Liszt, the Georgian-born pianist says: “Whether he was making transcriptions of operatic arias or art songs, he set out to evoke the feelings of the original work’s dramatic and poetic worlds … and in my view he succeeded in this with great strength and truth.”

The album includes Liszt’s realisation of the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, a spectacular take on Bellini’s opera La sonnambula from Liszt’s great rival, Sigismund Thalberg, and Harold Bauer’s adaptation of César Franck’s noble Prélude, Fugue et Variation. As the Observer has written, Mariam Batsashvili’s “technical prowess and ability to negotiate Liszt’s showy grandeur is a given, but her sense of his inner world, his wistful, nonchalant poetry sets her apart.”

Tracklist

1. Franck Transc. By Harold Bauer: Prelude Fugue Et Variation O
2. Thalberg: Grand Caprice Sur Des Motifs De La Sonnambula De V
3. Wagner Arr. Liszt: Isoldes Liebestod S.447
4. Liszt: Die Lorelei S. 532
5. Schubert Arr. Liszt: Standchen S.560/7a After Schubert's Lie
6. Schubert Arr. Liszt: Aufenthalt S.560/3 After Schubert's Lie
7. Chopin: Waltz No.5 In a Flat Op.42
8. Gounod Transc. Liszt: Valse De L'opera Faust S.407
9. Liszt: Valse De Bravoure S. 214/1
10. Schubert Transcr. R. Strauss: Waltz In G Flat D. Anh. I/14 K

Label: Plg Uk Classics | Origin: Holland