Metanoia: Works by Liszt
Yulianna Avdeeva (piano)
Pentatone PTC5187655 68:39 mins
In her earlier recordings, this Moscow-born winner of the 2010 Chopin Competition has already shown that she must be one of the finest pianists in the world. And this remarkable release, focusing on Liszt’s middle-period and late music, is surely her best yet.
In some ways, what makes Yulianna Avdeeva’s playing so special is what it isn’t. Nothing expressive is exaggerated, yet nothing is even momentarily short-changed. Immense technical firepower is ever-present, and is never flashed about because there’s no need.
Avdeeva’s keyboard tone, so beautiful in lyrical passages is conjured here from what sounds like an exceptional Steinway piano. Once owned by Horowitz, this is now in the Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana, where these recordings were made in a near-perfect acoustic, combining clarity and warmth with the right touch of atmospheric resonance.
If you’re wondering about the album’s title, the apparent meaning of ‘Metanoia’ is ‘change in one’s spiritual life resulting from penance or conversion’. Although the word is not itself referenced in Avdeeva’s thoughtful booklet note, it connects with her perception of Liszt’s lifelong ‘transformative journey from virtuoso to visionary… For me, Liszt’s music has always been more than just virtuosic; his compositions present an existential inquiry – a poignant exploration of our deepest human feelings.’
Avdeeva clearly indicates that she planned the Sonata in B minor as the culminating work in the album’s running order, whereas in fact it comes first. The programme succeeds this way round in any case, showing how the introspective quality that dominates much of Liszt’s late music was already there in his earlier masterworks.
One of these is the Sonata, whose enormous single-movement span is here propelled by wonderfully deft and clear virtuosity – itself deployed within the wider perspective of Avdeeva’s instinctive skill at pacing each episode, so that the work’s total effect is lucid as well as spectacular.
Her approach to the late pieces then mesmerises the ear and the imagination. La lugubre gondola II, composed in the winter of early 1883 in Venice, depicts a water-borne funeral procession passing along the canal below Liszt’s window. The music is technically elementary by any standards, let alone Liszt’s. However, Avdeeva’s spellbinding use of soft tone reveals it as an understated masterpiece, with its desolate sadness haunting the memory.
Elsewhere, the flickering passagework of the Bagatelle sans tonalité is dazzlingly delivered, to be followed by some of Liszt’s startling old-age explorations of pre-modernist dissonance – quiet and melacholy in Nuages gris (‘Grey Clouds’), ferocious in Unstern! (‘Bad’ or ‘Unlucky Star’).
Finally comes the second of the Deux Légendes, Liszt’s depiction of St Francis of Paola ‘walking on the waves’ as he crosses the Strait of Messina (with the help of his cloak outstretched beneath him and doubling up as a sail). Avdeeva here combines tumultuous panache with phenomenal technical accuracy, and then beautifully catches the simplicity of the saint’s prayer of thanksgiving when he has reached the opposite shore. This is the playing of a rare and true artist.
