Denes Varjon - Precipitando (2012) [Official Digital Download]

Hungarian pianist Denes Varjon has made important contributions to the ECM New Series’catalog. This recording, his first solo release for the label, finds the renowned musician drawing comparisons between legendary works by Berg, Janacek and Liszt. The recital draws listeners in within moments; beginning with the brooding language of Berg’s Piano Sonata Op.1 and continues with Janacek’s impressionistic “In the Mists”. Finally, the album concludes with the transparent B-minor Sonata by Liszt. The beautiful account of these treasured pieces are rendered with immaculate phrasing, a must own!

"Precipitando," precipitating, is an excellent title for this recital, which is dramatically better as a whole than as the sum of its parts. Each work, in the vision of pianist Dénes Várjon, is the precipitate, or perhaps the crystallization, of an experimental tradition that began with Liszt and continued in various forms through the Second Viennese School and the French Impressionists, whom Várjon considers manifestations of related rather than opposed impulses. Várjon's most novel take here is his way of looking at Liszt as a proto-modern, getting away from the rock-star image bequeathed by, among others, filmmaker Ken Russell. Instead, as Paul Griffiths puts it in his fine notes, Liszt was the "forerunner" of Strauss and Schoenberg "in matters for form because he was so in matters of harmony, a continuous, constantly evolving structure answering the needs of a harmonic style in which keys and key relationships can no longer be taken for granted." That description might apply to all three of the pieces on the album: the densely motivic and harmonically challenging Piano Sonata, Op. 1, of Berg, and even Janácek's In the mists, which pushes Debussy's Impressionism to the breaking point harmonically. You could find better recordings of any of these pieces individually; the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor may seem perfunctory for some listeners. Yet hearing the three works together in this way becomes a source of revelations, many of them concerning the fact that harmonic experimentation was never an end in itself for composers in the second half of the 19th century. An intelligent triumph of programming, and engineering as well.

Tracklist:

01 - Alban Berg: Sonata op. 1
02 - Leoš Janáček: V mlhach (In the mists) (1912): I Andante
03 - Leoš Janáček: V mlhach (In the mists) (1912): II Molto adagio
04 - Leoš Janáček: V mlhach (In the mists) (1912): III Andantino
05 - Leoš Janáček: V mlhach (In the mists) (1912): IV Presto
06 - Franz Liszt: Sonata in B minor (1853)

Produced by Manfred Eicher.
Recorded in April 2011 at Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano


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