Liszt: Via crucis; Ave Maria S20/1; Die Seligpreisungen; Pater noster, S41/1; Vater unser, S29

COMPOSERS: Liszt
LABELS: Naxos
WORKS: Via crucis; Ave Maria S20/1; Die Seligpreisungen; Pater noster, S41/1; Vater unser, S29
PERFORMER: Choir of Radio Svizzera, Lugano/Diego Fasolis (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: 8.553786

Liszt’s devotional music tends towards restraint and has lived in the shadow of his more flamboyant secular compositions. Yet this welcome disc – another imaginative addition to the Naxos list – shows that the same incisive and probing musical mind is at work across the supposed divide. The Via crucis, the most substantial piece here, is a structured meditation on that most Catholic of Good Friday devotions, the Stations of the Cross. Each Station has its own musical and dramatic character, realised through the spare scoring of combinations of chorus, soloists and, in this version, piano. The work is partly organised around a motif representing the Cross, yet it is strikingly ecumenical, not only religiously – Liszt imports a Lutheran chorale from Bach’s St Matthew Passion – but stylistically: the music employs plainchant as well as more typically Lisztian chromaticism. Diego Fasolis directs from the piano rather than from the more familiar organ, bringing a chamber-like intimacy, even starkness, to the work. It also seems to emphasise the harmonic boldness that – especially in this liturgical context – seems almost to anticipate Messiaen. There is sometimes a lack of intensity, but the performances are generally focused and committed. William Humphreys-Jones