Hyperion Records

According to the surviving correspondence, Liszt made three elaborations of the music of Pier Adolfo Tirindelli (1858–1937) in Rome on 31 October 1880, but only this elaboration of the Seconda Mazurka per pianoforte, variata da F. Liszt seems to have survived, and that rarely enough for the work to have been missing from most of the Liszt catalogues. (A letter of Liszt, in which he proposes to help Tirindelli in any way possible, speaks of a song All’ideale and an Adagio from a Trio, and suggests that all three works are ready for engraving.) Although Tirindelli was an all-round musician (he was also a violinist and a professor at the Liceo Marcello in Venice), and produced a body of work in all the major nineteenth-century forms, his personality does not seem to have been strong enough to guarantee his survival. This piece is several degrees more memorable than one might expect, and Liszt has extended it with several gentle-to-brooding variations of his own.

from notes by Leslie Howard © 1996