MY FAVORITES: BEETHOVEN AND LISZT
It is an enormous pleasure for me to introduce my second solo CD album, featuring works by Beethoven and Liszt. These two composers have exerted a strong influence on me throughout my life and played a paramount role in forming me as a musician. I could be wild and unlimited in expression in Liszt, sincere and firm when playing Beethoven. The two, in tandem, always helped me convey my complex individuality.
I was 17 years old when I experienced my first encounter with the most sublime works these two composers ever wrote. Beethoven‘s Hammerklavier Sonata in B flat Major, Op. 106 and Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor introduced me to new worlds of imagination, sounds, forms, and shapes. I was riveted by their intensity of expression, by the contrasts and the poetry they contain. It felt like diving beneath the surface of the ocean to discover a completely different universe with new colours, shapes and unusual movements, or like being catapulted to the cosmos, surrounded by infinite space and time,
exposed to the wonder and mystery of the Universe.... Liner notes by Tamar Bereia
If you would open any biography of Franz Liszt, you would probably mostly read about his disquiet life as a piano virtuoso, his passionate love life, and the return to his catholic roots at the end of his life. Although all of this might be true, it only scratches the surface of his comprehensive musical personality. Liszt was a pianist, conductor, teacher and organiser, but above all he was a composer of a voluminous, capricious body of work. Even though his piano works formed his core business, he gave rise to the symphonic poem, got rid of the organ's stuffy appearance, and reinvigorated the oratorio. Moreover, with his piano transciptions of Bach's organ works and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, he was an advocate of both old and new music.
Together with his son-in-law Richard Wagner, he was in the forefront of the Romantic movement and anticipated the musical revolutions of the early 20th century with his new composition techniques.