There is bound to be a spate of new Liszt recordings this year, which marks the centenary of the composer's death. These two new releases are admirable. Campanella's performances on an 1876 Steinway, housed at the Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth, a piano which belonged to Wagner, create an impression of authenticity that adds especial pathos to Liszt's two musical reactions to his son-in-law's death: R. W.—Venezia and Am Grabe Richard Wagners. The piano has been well restored, the treble having a golden tone, full of half-lights in its colour.
Barenboim's CD release presents some of the best piano sound I have heard, and also playing of exceptional refinement regarding dramatic impact and the varying of textures. The disc opens with the 1852 transcription of the Entry of the Guests on the Wartburg from Tannhauser in a rip-roaring performance that conveys orchestrally massive effects with ideal panache. Barenboim's advocacy makes a complete nonsense of Sacheverell Sitwell's disparaging remarks about these transcriptions. DG have managed to cope well with fortissimo episodes; they never pound. But then Barenboim throughout the disc reveals an extraordinary mastery over the dynamic range. The Spinning Chorus transcription might strike some as a little mannered, but the dizzy humour of his performance is so individual as to win me over for one.
Campanella's version of the Spinning Chorus is a little slower, and the older piano naturally lacks the clarity of Barenboim's; pianistic effects are not so evident with the Italian. It is when he tackles the darkly obscure late piano pieces that Campanella is in his element. From the impressionistic sally into the pious setting of Sancta Dorothea (1877) to the frightening sense of desolation in the two versions of La lugubre gondola, Campanella reveals the late Liszt not as an eccentric who had lost his way, but as an innovator whose late pieces could not be assimilated into the body of piano literature for three quarters of a century, on account of their extreme modernity. '