Annees de pelerinage - Suisse

"Hough seems to capture the romantic spirit of this cycle so effectively. He masterfully achieves that just balance of lyricism and pyrotechnics so necessary to the successful playing of Liszt's music"
(MusicWeb Aug 2005)

'Stephen Hough handles this more intimate side of Liszt admirably, with playing of great expressive warmth - As a bonus, Hough throws in Liszt's three operatic paraphrases from Gounod, playing the fine reverie after Romeo and Juliet quite beautifully, and tossing off the virtuoso transcription of the waltz from Faust with appropriate panache' (BBC Music Magazine)

Liszt's three books of Années de pèlerinage contain some of his most important music and exemplify the fusion of art and nature which was central to the nineteenth-century Romantic movement which the composer epitomized. Book 1, recorded here, reached its final form in 1855 but most of the pieces were written in the 1830s during Liszt's stay in Switzerland with his mistress Marie d'Agoult. Each piece has an illustrative title and aims to capture the emotion invoked by a particular scene; this was a revolutionary approach to music in its time and allowed Liszt to create a whole new world where piano texture is used purely to create atmosphere.

Music requiring this degree of pianistic sophistication seems perfectly suited to the skills of Stephen Hough, and so it proves, as he captures to perfection the delicate glitter of Au bord d'une source or the grandeur of Vallée d'Obermann.

Unusually, the CD is completed with Liszt's complete transcriptions from Gounod operas. The three pieces include one virtuoso warhorse - the Faust waltz - and two reflective and lyrical pieces which are almost completely unknown