Volume 43 of Leslie Howard’s Herculean undertaking completes the Annees de pelerinage (he has already recorded the first volume with its pictorial evocation of Switzerland, 9/96) and the third, a classic instance of Liszt’s religious symbolism whether dark-hued or life-affirming (“Les jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este”). Here he concentrates on Liszt’s response to Italy’s incomparable literary and artistic riches, a familiar enough masterpiece yet typically spiced by Howard with some fascinating side-steps and discoveries. His brief extension to the conclusion of “Canzone” (from Venezia e Napoli) alters its disconsolate ending. There is an authentic whirl added to the climax of “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca” and some emendations in the Dante Sonata are clarified and explained in Howard’s scholarly and exemplary notes. As an encore he revisits Switzerland and gives us “Au bord d’une source” with nine extra bars, a present, it seems, for Giovanni Sgambati. Such detail is always central to Howard’s enterprise.
I wish I could be equally enthusiastic about the actual performances, which are dutiful rather than ardent or exploratory. Howard’s sonority, while outwardly robust, lacks richness, variety and texture, qualities notably absent in “Sposalizio”, one of Liszt’s most exalted Catholic effusions. Here, his phrasing is choppy rather than long-breathed and there is too little sense of Liszt’s near Wagnerian mysticism in the closing pages. More attuned to sobriety than ecstasy or romantic agony he conveys something of the troubled speculation of “Il penseroso”, but in the Petrarch Sonnets he lacks much sense of magnanimity, vision or sophistication. Venezia e Napoli is a relative success but in the Dante Sonata, where Liszt is super-rhetorical and declamatory, there is too little contrast between celestial and purgatorial visions. Overall, I felt inclined to echo the ghost of Hamlet’s father who comes “to whet” his son’s “almost blunted appetite”.
The recordings are impressive even when they mirror Howard’s lack of subtlety and tonal range. This collector’s item surely demonstrates the dangers of an intensive if not exclusive preoccupation with a single genius and there are many finer versions of all these works in the catalogue. Horowitz can set the scene incomparably in “Au bord d’une source” and so, indeed, can Kathryn Stott in the Petrarch Sonnets. But for a complete recording of the Annees de pelerinage I would unhesitatingly recommend Lazar Berman on DG.'