I sometimes feel like Liszt is still out there writing new music 🤦♂️ Every generation has thought they had heard it all, but none of us have. Ridiculous.
un pianistic writing here. Doesn't feel like Liszt. The awkward notes are not smooth and wittingly placed as Liszt usually do in his big works like Reminiscense de Norma
This piece is practically a draft that Liszt didn't even decide to publish and thought no one would find. This score was only found between 2000 and 2010
Agreed, his Hyperion recording is really phenomenal; but I can’t use that because of copyright law :( So I used his live performance, which contains many mistakes..
Ok, if the phenomenal *Lesile Howard * is struggling with some of these passages a little (I'm thinking in particularly to around the 12:50 and 15:20 minute mark and the conclusion) that to me tells me that this piece is nearing the threshold of *unplayable*. Overall, this piece is just mind-bogglingly technically demanding, but it achieves this at the expense of some of its musicality. The piece has some phenomenal musical content, but it's so overblown with virtuosity that it loses some of its punch. I love Liszt, and this piece is amazing, but it is a bit... much. That being said, some of these passages and harmonies are wild for the time. Makes me wish Liszt would have rethought this piece and paired it down a little to be less of a showpiece and more of an artistic statement.
That's why Liszt decided not to publish it during his lifetime. It was not until 2009 that the Liszt Society finally published this piece in its Journal.
To be fair, it was still kind of a rough draft which Liszt almost finished but never really did and just abandoned it. I'm pretty sure if he still worked on it, he would've fixed a few things that didn't seem right.
I used the sheet music uploaded at Musesore, musescore.com/user/34074673/scores/6767569 But beware, that score is full of wrong notes.. (actually I edited the whole score by myself, referring the urtext of this piece.)
