Hyperion Records

Amongst Liszt’s Schubert editions, two stand out: Liszt edited all of the Impromptus, with minor suggestions of occasional alternative passages or distribution of material between the hands, but nothing in any of the remaining Schubert editions would justify a place in the Liszt catalogue as transcriptions except two works. The Impromptu in E flat major has so many clever little proposals to make a fuller texture and vary repeated phrases that the extra systems printed above the main text pretty well amount to another work altogether. The Impromptu in G flat major has only one alternative passage: its recapitulation is astonishingly rearranged with fulsome left-hand arpeggios and the melody played an octave higher reinforced with chords in the right hand; the rest of the piece is unaltered in any way. (This work appears in Liszt’s edition, as in so many nineteenth-century printings of the piece, in G major, and in four crotchets to the bar rather than eight. Liszt was apparently unaware of the original key, which is restored here, and in which Liszt’s altered passage can be just as readily performed.)

from notes by Leslie Howard © 1998