COMPOSERS: Franz Liszt LABELS: Genuin ALBUM TITLE: Liszt WORKS: Etudes d’exécution transcendante PERFORMER: Dinara Klinton (piano) CATALOGUE NO: Genuin GEN 16409
What makes this recording such an astonishing achievement is that, somehow, this young Ukrainian-born pianist makes it seem not really astonishing at all. Possessing every ounce of technical resource that these fearsomely difficult works require, she’s therefore able to leave behind any sense of an issue there, and to deliver the music itself with a naturalness and freedom that really does amaze. Even at thunderous full throttle, she never plays an ugly note, delivering wave after wave of handsomely full and rounded piano tone.
Besides all this, Dinara Klinton’s interpretative gift gives her a wonderful instinct for what to do with it, and her response to the Byronic sweep of Liszt’s imagination enthrals at every point. While the A minor study’s figuration hurtles up and down the keyboard, she finds and points up detail in the inner voices with conductor-like precision. Entirely on terms with the massive demands of Mazeppa’s outer sections, she has the central one singing with an unaffected grandeur that recalls Claudio Arrau’s playing. The harmonic shifts in the closing stages of Harmonies du soir always sound beautiful: here they are rapturously so. Klinton can find a complete world in a single quiet chord, like the simple F major one that opens Paysage, or the deep, strangely balanced one that closes it. The lyrical surge of Wilde Jagd’s central passage becomes a dream-like, pre-Albéniz flow of keyboard colour that haunts the memory. And for good measure, all this is captured in superb and beautiful recorded sound (in the Leipzig Gewandhaus’s Mendelssohn-Saal).
Malcolm Hayes
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