#FRANZ LISZT MOVIES SERIES#

It has, furthermore, been a year without major additions to the Liszt literature, without new Liszt films or documentaries or reissues of old ones. You would never have known that both Pacific Symphony music director Carl St.Clair and Los Angeles Opera music director James Conlon have made notable recordings of Liszt’s neglected oratorios.

#FRANZ LISZT MOVIES SERIES#

The feisty Jacaranda new and unusual music series in Santa Monica mounted a rare performance of Liszt’s visionary late choral work, “Via Crucis.” The Hungarian organist Laszlo Fassang played Liszt’s way-out “Ad Nos Ad Salutarem” as part of his Disney organ recital at Disney last month.īut that was pretty much it for the Liszt year in Southern California. The Philharmonic Society in Orange County did the most locally, bringing in the Canadian pianist Louis Lortie in January to play all three parts of Liszt’s epic piano cycle “Annees de Pelerinage” (Years of Pilgrimage) and inviting Alan Walker to lecture on Liszt. Two weeks after the composer’s 200th birthday, the Chinese pianist relegated Liszt to flashy encores in a Walt Disney Concert Hall recital. Summer at the Hollywood Bowl brought the potboiler “Les Preludes.” The Piano Concerto No. The usually resourceful Los Angeles Philharmonic all but wrote Liszt off. At the Palace of Arts, Budapest’s major concert hall, during the so-called World Liszt Day (the world here being relegated mainly to Eastern Europe), the big event was a concert of his two piano concertos, Liszt chestnuts both. What did turn up, moreover, tended to be the same old, same old. Significant Liszt performances were scant in these parts this year, as they were in most places outside of Budapest or Raiding (Liszt’s Hungarian birthplace, now in Austria).

But Liszt’s neglected music, a vast cache of treasures, remains neglected - including some particularly fine and little-known Christmas music (such as the oratorio “Christus”), which will remain little known this Christmas. It left us with several welcome recordings, for which Christmas shoppers can rejoice. The first volume of Alan Walker’s monumental biography of Liszt is titled “The Virtuoso Years: 1811-1847.” Two more incident-packed volumes, nearly another 1,300 pages, follow.Īnd yet the Liszt year was, if not entirely Liszt-less, certainly listless. He retired from the concert stage at 35 and lived 40 more years (which also makes this year the 125th anniversary of his death), devoting himself to composition and eventually the church. Lisztomania alone might have provided the classical music community with a terrific opportunity on this anniversary year to add a little context to issues that intrigue and trouble 21st century culture.īut there’s plenty more: Liszt’s calling as a sex idol was but one aspect, and a relatively brief one, of perhaps the most extraordinary career in all music. Shocked by such displays, medical men investigated what they believed must be an underlying pathology infecting these ladies. “Lisztomania” was the term the German poet Heinrich Heine coined at the time for this mass hysteria. He helped liberate 19th century women by tempting them to flout social convention, making frank public expressions of female sexuality fashionable. Has anyone ever called Liszt the first feminist? Perhaps he was that too. The atmosphere is as sexually charged as a Beatles concert a century-and-a-quarter later, when a small wave from Paul was all it took to arouse hysterical screams from teenage girls. The women sway, swoon, drink wine, blush, push close to the stage, fling flowers and examine through opera glasses every inch of the long-haired and leonine Liszt. With his left hand on the keys, he is waving to his mostly female audience with his right. Liszt was said to have been the greatest keyboard virtuoso the world had ever known - and the most showy.Īn 1842 caricature of the dashing Hungarian at the piano on stage in Berlin shows him as clearly the prototype for the modern rock star. 22, 1811, is titled “Liszt, My Piano Hero.” Of course Liszt would be a hero of the flamboyant Lang Lang. Lang Lang’s latest CD, one of many releases celebrating the 200th anniversary of Franz Liszt’s birth on Oct.

Franz liszt movies