Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is best known as the virtuoso champion of especially complex piano music. Like no other, he knows how to unravel incredibly complex scores with almost surgical precision. In view of its impressive discography (including Ligeti, Messiaen and Bach), this Liszt double album seems somewhat of an outsider. Nothing could be further from the truth. In an interview on Youtube,
… Aimard calls it his Liszt portrait. And he paints that in his well-known thorough way. Each disc contains an independent program in which Aimard extends two lines from Liszt well into the twentieth century. On the first, Aimard lets one-part sonatas by Wagner, Scriabin and Berg flow into Liszt's masterly Sonata in B minor; a movement that is supplemented along the way with later piano work by Liszt. The second CD is dedicated to Liszt the innovator and shows relationships in work by twentieth-century composers such as Bartók, Stroppa, Ravel and Messiaen. This seemingly loose sequence of works places Aimard in a suggestive movement from dark to light. Starting with Liszt's Thrénodie and ending with the almost transcendental Vallée d'Obermann from Année de Pèlerinage. Without a doubt this album is one of the most important releases of the Liszt year 2011. (JWvR)more
