GRAMOPHONE Magazine Editor's Choice - December 2015. Ondine’s fourth release together with star baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky features a program of sonnets by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) and Franz Liszt (1811–1886). Hvorostovsky is accompanied by his longstanding duo partner, the Estonian pianist Ivari Ilja.

Angela Hewitt’s notes for this important new album describe a teenager’s moment of revelation when she first came to appreciate the epic masterpiece that is the Liszt Piano Sonata. Here we have a heart-felt recording where this palpable sense of wonder is manifest alongside Hewitt’s enthralling technical facility at the keyboard. The programme is completed by the second half of Liszt’s dazzling second Année de pèlerinage collection: the three Petrarch Sonnets and the noble Dante Sonata, the latter composed as a fund-raiser for the Bonn Beethoven monument in 1839.

Firma Melodiya presents a set of rare recordings by Emil Gilels.The world knows many talented pianists and a few great masters who tower above them all. Emil Gilels is one of them. The titans of piano like Gilels are borne once in a century. Those were the kind of reviews that accompanied Gilels throughout his pianistic career beginning with his victory at the all-union competition in 1933 in Moscow. However, this set will open new sides to Gilelss repertoire even to those who is well acquainted with his recordings. We will hear Emil Gilels as an ensemble musician.The titan of piano, who roused the audiences and orchestras, was able to turn into a fine chamber musician, a wonderful ensemble partner as though he dissolved his brightest individuality in a piece he performed. The more so because Gilelss partners were truly brilliant soloists such as Yakov Flier and Yakov Zak (piano), Elizaveta Gilels (violin), musicians from the Beethoven Quartet Dmitri Tsyganov (violin), Vadim Borisovsky (viola) and Sergei Shirinsky (cello). The set features compositions from various periods.

Although highly productive and respected in his lifetime as a composer of Lieder, Robert Franz (1815–92) has since become a peripheral figure in music history. One reason may be that he avoids dramatic contrasts and instead aims at an emotional ambiguity: ‘My representation of joy is always tinged with melancholy, whilst that of suffering is always accompanied by an exquisite sensation of losing oneself’, he once wrote to Liszt. As a consequence his music appeals to those who are able ‘to admire the nuances of a charcoal drawing without longing for the colours of a painting’, to quote from Georges Starobinski’s liner notes to this recording. As they began to explore the songs of Franz, Starobinski and the baritone Christian Immler were moved by their findings to devise a programme which includes 23 of the composer’s often quite brief songs. Using the poet Heinrich Heine as their guiding star, they present these – all Heine settings but from different opus groups – in the form of two ‘imagined’ song cycles.

In 2009, at the age of 19, Haochen Zhang became one of the youngest musicians ever to win the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Since then he has had a busy concert schedule, primarily in his native China and in the U.S.A. but also in Europe where he made his début at the BBC Proms in 2014. Recording has been less of a priority for Zhang, and it is only now that he releases his first studio album, recorded at the Reitstadel, the well-known audiophile venue in Neumarkt in Germany. For this recital, Haochen Zhang has devised a programme made up of works that he feels particularly close to. As he writes in his own liner notes, they ’not only speak to me in a very intimate way, but also connect with one another at a corresponding level of intimacy: as a whole they form a unique musical narrative.’ The pieces all share a reflective and introspective quality, albeit reflective in different ways. Opening the disc Schumann’s Kinderszenen were described by the composer as ‘reflections of an adult for adults’ and in the closing Op. 117 Intermezzi, Brahms also seems to be looking backwards – but with resignation rather than intimate tenderness. Framed by these two, the works by Liszt and Janácek contain overtly dramatic episodes, but contemplative interludes form a recurrent feature of the Ballade, and in Presentiment, the first movement of Janácek’s Sonata, the dark forebodings seem to rise up from the composer’s own soul.

Howard, catching the authentic tinge of hysteria, mounts swiftly upwards in an ecstasy that burns away awareness of mere notes.

A documentary on the great pianists of the twentieth century, introduced, written and narrated by David Dubal. Featuring the music of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Clementi, Debussy, Field, Grainger, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Padarewski, Rachmaninov, Schubert, Scriabin and Weber. Featuring musicians Claudio Arrau, Alexander Brailowsky, Van Cliburn, Alfred Cortot, Glenn Gould, Percy Grainger, Myra Hess, Josef Hoffmann, Vladimir Horowitz, Wanda Landowska, Ignacy Paderewski, Artur Rubinstein, and Rudolf Serkin. Bonus: Claudio Arrau Centenary reissued of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Liszt’s Dante Symphony is a work of astonishing imagination. His evocation of the ‘Inferno’, the shade of Francesca da Rimini and her sad remembered love is marked by strokes of genius which, with bewildering frequency, pre-empt the mature Wagner (who was, incidentally, the dedicatee of the work). If the second and third movements – the ‘Paradiso’ was wisely commuted to a setting of part of the Magnificat plus a brief Hosanna – don’t quite match the sweep and control of the first, they have their own particular magic. Even so, the work has not acquired the popularity of the Faust Symphony. Barenboim’s new recording with the Berlin Philharmonic is thus particularly welcome. Not only does it augment the number of available recordings to four, it is also the most polished. Even performing ‘live’, the Berlin Philharmonic turns in a performance of near-perfection – the solo lines are a particular joy.

Liszt was the only contemporary whose music Richard Wagner gratefully acknowledged as an influence upon his own. His lasting fame was an alchemy of extraordinary digital ability – the greatest in the history of keyboard playing – an unmatched instinct for showmanship, and one of the most progressive musical imaginations of his time. Hailed by some as a visionary, reviled by others as a symbol of empty Romantic excess, Franz Liszt wrote his name across music history in a truly inimitable manner. From his youth, Liszt demonstrated a natural facility at the keyboard that placed him among the top performing prodigies of his day. Though contemporary accounts describe his improvisational skill as dazzling, his talent as a composer emerged only in his adulthood.

Borrowing from the title of Proust’s great novel, the latest recital by Imogen Cooper features a collection of pieces that she learnt as a teenager in Paris, or in her twenties working with Alfred Brendel in Vienna, but none of which she has performed on the concert platform, or really played at all in the intervening years. Cooper studied in Paris from 1961 to 1967 with Jacques Février (who had known Ravel well), Yvonne Lefébure (who had known Alfred Cortot), and Germaine Mounier. She started to wonder about the messages from her teachers she would find on her scores, and about the nature of memory. She was also interested to see if the repertoire she has acquired since she learnt these pieces would change her view, or shed new light on them. This highly personal recital is an exemplar of Imogen Cooper’s outstanding pianism and musicianship.

Although Liszt’s thirteen symphonic poems exist in two-piano transcriptions prepared by the composer himself, it was his Czech student August Stradal (1860–1930) who transcribed twelve of them for solo piano – versions which demand almost superhuman virtuosity. Stradal died before he could tackle the last of the symphonic poems, Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe; Risto-Matti Marin has made good that lacuna with his own virtuoso transcription, and adds six of Stradal’s transcriptions of Liszt songs for good measure.

The most-talked about artist of the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition created huge excitement and world-wide media attention with his riveting background and “genius-like playing” (Boris Berezovksy). Debargue, who is 25, started the piano late at 11 years old, learning mostly in isolation. After dropping the instrument for three years to play in a rock band and study literature, he started formal piano training aged 20. Placed 4th, he was described by media as “the real winner” of the competition and received the Music Critics’ Association award as “the pianist whose incredible gift, artistic vision and creative freedom have impressed the critics as well as the audience.” Valery Gergiev, the competition’s chairman, broke protocol by letting Debargue play in the winners’ gala and not prizewinner Dmitry Masleev. Lucas Debargue's debut album is a live recording at the Salle Cortot in Paris and documents his first concert in his hometown after the competition. The centrepiece of his first recording is Ravel’s monumentally challenging Gaspard de la nuit.

Franz Liszt composed little chamber music, though the handful of pieces he wrote or arranged for violin and piano represent his enduring interest in that combination, from the Grand Duo concertant (1835/49) to La lugubre gondola (1882-83). This program by violinist Ulf Wallin and pianist Roland Pöntinen offers those pieces and five more selections that demonstrate Liszt's fondness for passionate, long-breathed melodies in the Magyar vein and turbulent accompaniments that allowed for virtuosity. The standout track of this hybrid SACD is the arrangement of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 (ca. 1850), which gives a full treatment to those characteristics, and provides Wallin and Pöntinen their most dazzling displays. While the moods of the surrounding pieces are for the most part lyrical and subdued, the performances are compelling and the sound of the recording is close-up and focused, with the presence and clarity of a recital.

The Vienna Stories title of this release by harpist Anneleen Lenaerts is more personal than thematic. Only some of the pieces are from or about Vienna (although the inclusion of An der schönen blauen Donau, Op. 314 ("The Blue Danube Waltz") qualifies the collection as Viennese in the end. Lenaerts is the principal harpist of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, where she has become an emerging star of her instrument. At the end of the program, she brings in some of her Philharmonic colleagues as a small string group. This is entirely in keeping with the spirit of the program, which evokes unusually nicely the atmosphere of a salon harp concert of a century or more ago. Most of the pieces are transcriptions of various ages, and Lenaerts contributes a Fantasy on La Bohème by Puccini of her own; it is indeed good to hear a new entry in the operatic paraphrase genre, which any 19th century listener would have taken as natural, but which is mighty rare these days.

Leave the "Anthropocene" theme aside for a moment and revel in Renée Fleming's voice on this album, released in 2021 when the singer was in her early 60s. The instrument is in fine shape, and Fleming's decision to forgo operatic performances in favor of art song is looking better and better. The top notes don't have the force of a 30-year-old's but have a rather eerie precision. Perhaps there's a bit of strain in the register just below the top, but the burnished quality of her low notes is absolutely gorgeous and more than compensates. As for the music, the new term "Anthropocene" denotes the current epoch in which the effect of human activities on the climate is fundamental.