On this, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hungarian composer Franz Liszt, we have an album calculated to make a splash. And why not? Liszt was an innovator, a Romantic right up there with Chopin, Berlioz, Schubert and Wagner, but also perhaps the world’s first Rock Star. Ken Russell didn’t title his bio-pic “Lisztomania” for nothing.
Khatia Buniatishvili, a 24-year-old from Tbilisi, is a self-styled Romantic as well, evidenced here by her thematic selection and arrangement of material to suit her Faustian concept of beauty and innocence, temptation and worldly acclaim, and the artistic quest for perfection and immortality – as personified (all in one, one in all) by Marguerite, Mephisto, and Faust. The DVD that accompanies this recording – described as a film poem and also a Faustian dream – is something of an arty hallucination with Buniatishvili in all three roles.
At the core of this offering sits the complex and demanding “Sonata in B minor,” dexterously entwining several motifs and their variations, and in length running half an hour. For any pianist it is a challenging work that plummets and soars, grows dim and becomes din, and one needs to listen, listen, listen. We can’t appreciate this work while engaged in another task. And even paying close attention is not enough; one needs to delve into it over and over in an attempt to ferret out its shape and its density.
Buniatishvili is given to a pronounced, assertive style of playing, and you can pick her out of the lineup, so to speak, when she performs the “Mephisto Waltz No. 1 (The Dance in the Village Inn).” She can, of course, almost purr through the softer, contemplative passages. After all, she wouldn’t be on this record if her fingers didn’t contain both a gas pedal and a set of brakes.
“La lugubre gondola” is a late work, one that broods while drifting. As Sigfried Schibli explains in his liner notes, Liszt “spent some time with Wagner inVeniceduring the autumn and winter of 1882/3. According to eyewitnesses in Liszt’s entourage, the gondolas that took part in funeral processions filled him with immense sadness.” How much of that was in his mind when he sat down to compose the piece we don’t know, but it is not a flashy work, and half the skill in performing it might be in the articulation of the silences between the notes that bolster the whole. Buniatishvili certainly conveys this.
Within the album, “La lugubre gondola” is assigned a kind of death-before-resurrection status, because Buniatishvili then follows it with Liszt’s transcriptions of Bach’s “Prelude and Fugue in A minor.” Perhaps this is like attempting a triple somersault: Pianists have to place their fingers on the keys but their hands need to reach into the soul of the work. Here, the challenge is to reach into the soul of Liszt as Liszt reaches into the soul of Bach.
Khatia Buniatishvili at times seems to be a little showy, and when she’s in her 60s she may temper and rethink what in her 20s is more a reflection of sheer exuberance. But in the here and now this is a fine debut that makes demands on the listener, just as performing it surely made demands on her. ER
