Monday 27 April 2015

Liszt - Piano Recital [Mardirossian]

This is one of a number of discs i bought from Amazon fairly recently, i tapped in 'Liszt', and a preference of 'price low to high', and it's amazing what turns up for a really cheap price, Liszt is a Composer that i've had a hard time with, he can have a tendency to be flashy and overblown, his compositions filled with virtuoso piano playing, and maybe the pure poetry and lyricism is missing, but i'm warming to him, and discs like this really help me, this disc appeared in my Blog three years ago [31 July 2012].

Vahan Mardirossian is Armenian, he's now 39, and surprisingly he recorded this disc back in 2007, the front cover photography [by Karim Ramzi], is a close cropped full face portrait, shadows in the eyes, hands in front in a praying position, the lettering nicely balanced in the corners, very well done, and the back inlay is very clear, i like the way the lettering is both sides of the white bar on the right, plus red numerals for the timings also helps.

So again for this second Blog entry of this disc, it was the Liszt / Schubert Standchen i liked the most, its' a beautiful composition that stands up well without the words, it's a beautiful melody, the right hand treble is vocal line, left hand bass the piano line, plus there's a vocal 'echo' by the piano [0:24+ & 0:39+], works really well, in the second stanza [1:46+], the vocal line is in the bass, while the piano 'echo' is now in the treble [1:57+ & 2:12+], and behind it all is the constant rolling of the bass notes, and then Schubert uses a more complex variation [3:19-4:14], where lovely echoes are made in the treble, it's the best little section of the whole piece, it's so good to hear this piece again today.

Here's Alesia Arnatovich playing Standchen on YouTube.