Liszt: Piano Sonata

This year, April is Hamelin month at Hyperion; not content with giving us another blockbuster addition to the Romantic Piano Concerto series, the pianist gives us his contribution to the Liszt bicentenary.

The Liszt Sonata is undoubtedly one of the peaks of the repertoire, and recordings are suitably copious, but when an artist of Hamelin’s virtuoso pedigree wishes to tackle it no excuse need be made for an additional version. The recital opens with a lesser-known masterwork, the Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H, and for light relief there is Liszt’s scintillating supplement to his Italian Année de Pèlerinage, the three pieces of Venezia e Napoli, but perhaps the emotional core of the recital is Liszt’s intensely spiritual Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude.

This is a major Liszt recital from one of today’s most admired recording artists.

CDA67760  79 minutes 19 seconds
GRAMOPHONE CRITICS' CHOICE
‘Hamelin is a musician of intellectual rigour, for whom playing all the notes better than almost anyone else is just the start. The Liszt Sonata is a veritable Becher's Brook for pianists but he sails ...
‘Even by Marc-André Hamelin's standards this Liszt recital is a towering achievement. In the Fantasy and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H the opening idea emerges as if from a cloud of sulphur and, w ...
‘The world isn't short of pianists with an ultra-fluent technique. Even so, Marc-André Hamelin is a phenomenon: such rippling evenness of tone, flawless clarity, and rapid-fire precision together sugg ...