Hyperion Records

The Marche des pèlerins chantant la prière du soir is the unpublished first version of Liszt’s transcription for solo piano of the second movement of Berlioz’s Harold en Italie (cf the much later second version in volume 5 and the transcription for viola and piano in volume 23 of the Liszt series) and is much closer to Berlioz’s text. Later, Liszt would eliminate all the wide stretches so common in his works of the 1830s and 1840s, and would find an alternative solution to the problem of transcribing the passage where the viola accompanies a chorale—by repeating the whole passage in a varied manner.

from notes by Leslie Howard © 2011