American Liszt Society

I'm starting today feeling a little directionless, maybe because it was such a full weekend.

On Friday and Saturday I attended the national festival of the American Liszt Society in Washington, DC. I heard seventeen pianists perform at least five hours of Liszt's music, and there were more events that didn't attend. (It just struck me that 17 is also the number of dollars I paid to park!)

Some of the highlights for me were:

visiting the Library of Congress where the first day's concerts took place

making new musical friends

and hearing superb performances -

Gila Goldstein playing "Wohin?" was magical. The variety and type of tone, the pacing, and her technique that creates the illusion that she isn't playing made this a performance I'll remember for a long time.

Sean Duggan, Benedictine monk and master of the music of Bach, played several works from Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses. Unfortunately, I only saw and partly heard the last bit of "Benediction . . ." through the window. Even through the window, he conveyed a spirit of seriousness and sincerity that I found very moving.

Justin Kolb, who is very warm and outgoing in welcoming newcomers to the Liszt Society, played the "Apparitions" and gave a spellbinding rendering of the unsettling and occult mood of these seldom-heard pieces.

Elizabeth and Eugene Pridinoff gave one the best two-piano performances I'v heard. They played Les Preludes and Concerto Pathetique. I believe this second piece is essentially the same work as the Grosseskonzertsolo.

Louis Nagel payed the Don Giovanni paraphrase in a way that drew us all into what he was doing with great concentration, and the audience response - which was almost always enthusiastic - really indicated depth of appreciation for the musical quality of his performance.

In addition to those performance highlights, I also heard some of Liszt's violin pieces, one of which is the piano piece "Il Penseroso" twice with some contrasting material in-between.

A number of performers put collections of pieces together and asked the audience not to applaud until the end as they believed there were connections between the works. This happened with both halves of Michele Campanella's recital - first half, sacred works and the second half, Hungarian Rhapsodies, and also with the violin pieces.

A final reflection on hearing so much Liszt in a few hours - while I believe a great deal of Liszt's music is very strong, I don't think he expected anyone to ever hear so much of it at once. Any good composer would organize things in a very specific way if they knew that the works they were composing would be played back-to-back for hours on end.