This remarkable reissue of Alfred Brendel's Spa recordings, dating from 1950, sets the towering and the miniature side by side. No lover of his early work(he once described his first recordings of the Mozart Concertos as like featureless landscapes) Brendel has thankfully made an exception regarding what are surely among his greatest achievements.
Liszt's 'Christmas Tree' is a product of his old age, a time when he was lost in reflection rather than bravura. Dedicated to his grand-daughter, Daniela von Bulow, its eight sections are of an unsettling ambiguity ranging from simple piety to disillusion. Scorned by the academic world,, his later prophetic works dismissed as the eccentric products of senility, his longed for marriage to the Princess Caroline zu Sayn- Wittgensteini cruelly denied, beset with illness and the indiginity of old age, the feeling that he had lived too long, only his faith forbade his inclination to suicide, Small wonder that the 'Christmas Tree' should simultaneously evoke a time of festivity and unease. Liszt, after all, was the first to admit that he had squandered his life in vain-glorious display. The opening four pieces, culminating in 'Adeste fideles,' are as simple as they are haunting, an immediate contradiction of garlanded and pianistic display, These are followed by 'Scherzoso,' 'lighting the candles on the Christmas Tree,' magical and prophetic of Bartok in its flickering half lights, 'Carillon and a Berceuse where the wavering tonality and economy are the reverse of Liszt's previous Berceuse, a lavishly decorated tribute to Chopin in its second version.
This brings me to the final three pieces, 'Jadis'('Long Ago'), 'Ungarish'('In Hungarian style') and 'Polnish'(' In Polish style'). 'Jadis,' ironically written in waltz time and with some relation to the 'Valses oubliee,' tells of former happiness clouded by painful out-crys while 'Ungarisch', a sinister march, bears no resemblance to the glitter, the 'glanz' period of the first Fifteen Hungarian Rhapsodies. In 'Polnisch' you seem to sense the spectral figure of Chopin, violent and finally mocking. Liszt's worship of Chopin was met with icy disdain.
Then there is Busoni's epic 'Fantasia Contrapuntistica' music by a composer who 'disdained aural comfort' and, in a radically different sense to 'The Christmas Tree,' makes for nervous listening. This gigantic work, composed by a master pianist, is very much for those for whom the elevated and cerebral take pride of place, but which do not necessarily exclude the emotional and instinctive. Perhaps after all music so different in scale and dynamic as the Liszt and Busoni possess a common denominator, are simultaneously conciliatory and disturbing.
APR's excellent transfers come with an extended essay by the pianist himself, challenging at every level and not without a characteristically acerbic touch('of course there are those who think that a performance lacks imagination if he or she merely plays what is written, while its a demonstration of genius to turn everything upside down').
Bryce Morrison