The seventh and ninth instalments of Naxos’s Herculean project are tantalizing and thought-provoking, respectively. They are also superbly played and finely recorded. Liszt’s Soirees musicales may be slim pickings from the master’s workshop but they are also charming diversions embellished with characteristic discretion and sophistication. The manner is more direct, less fanciful or scintillating than in, say, his Soirees de Vienne, yet Liszt is never fully the altruist, drawing as much attention to his own skill as to Rossini’s freshness and vitality. The abrupt conclusion to “La promessa” is surprising, a stern dismissal of daydreams, and Kemal Gekic, a formidable virtuoso, is surely grateful for the burst of bravura allowed him in “Li marinari”. Yet his particular piece de resistance comes at the very end when, after the interminable ramblings of the William Tell Overture, he launches the final galop at 9'22'' with a pulverizing force and whiplash rhythmic aplomb.
Philip Thomson, who here makes his third appearance in this series, offers music at the opposite pole, much of it composed when Liszt had reached what the excellent insert-note quotes as a state of santa indifferenza (“blessed indifference”). Heard in succession such music, with its bewildering alternations of austerity and flamboyance, creates an odd sense of ambivalence, of the worldly and spiritual in uneasy rather than satisfactory accord. Both the “Benedictus” and “Offertorium” from S501 blossom from simple beginnings into full-blown splendour. Urbi et orbi gilds its initial plainness with a sudden blaze of glittering arpeggios, and in Zum Haus des Herrn ziehen wir Liszt disdains even a pretence of conventional musical or pianistic procedure (how extraordinary to think that the composer of, say, “La campanella” or the Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody also wrote music of such open defiance and prophecy). Yet beneath so much tireless reaching out lies a fierce religious fervour that holds and mesmerizes the listener – whatever his persuasion – and if the 11 Chorales offer simple hymnal piety, they end with an “Alleluja” that thunders Liszt’s belief to the heavens.
Philip Thomson is warmly sympathetic to every aspect of Liszt’s multi-faceted genius, whether in recondite or storming utterance. That he is a chess and table-tennis champion and parachutist (he admits to less success on the ice-hockey field) says much for his versatility.'