大象传媒

Stephen Johnson is joined by pianist Leslie Howard at the Birmingham International Piano Academy to uncover the musical nuances in some of Liszt's piano transcriptions.

Liszt was a celebrated virtuoso pianist and European superstar. His myriad piano transcriptions served a number of purposes. Some showed off his incredible technique, others were more easily playable by amateur musicians and so served to disseminate well-known pieces to a bigger audience. In others, there's a real sense that Liszt thought that the piano, as an instrument, actually had something different to bring to the original composition. He tackled Schubert songs, mammoth Beethoven symphonies, Wagnerian leitmotifs and Verdi grand operas, but none of his transcriptions are in any way a pastiche. All of them seem to carry a sense that Liszt cared deeply about the music and about the piano.