Truth can indeed be stranger than fiction. Ervin Nyiregyhazi, a prodigy of prodigies, was born in 1903 and, aided and abetted by one of the worst stage-mothers in history, he made a sensational US debut in 1920. This was followed by concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic and a dramatic realization, while deputizing for Rachmaninov, of what he saw as his unique ability to create sounds and colours virtually unknown to any other pianist. His late discovery of Liszt drove him into trances and illnesses and he became the subject of a six-year study published by Geza Revesz called The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy. Not surprisingly an essential imbalance emerged from such frenzied, meteoric progress and this, with a tragi-comic inability to cope with life's practicalities that put paid to his career. However, he was later rediscovered and heavily promoted by America's International Piano Archive Foundation before another descent into oblivion. His last concerts were given at the invitation of some Buddhist monks in Japan two years before his death in 1987.
The story is extreme, if not entirely unfamiliar, and it has been lovingly charted by Gregor Benko on this and earlier releases where his belief shines through a rough sea of controversy. For some Nyiregyhazi was a charlatan, for others (according to Benko they included de Larrocha, Bolet and Garrick Ohlsson) he was a genius. Certainly the outsize gestures on this record, made in 1978, are wholly 'operatic' in one sense and the ghost of Nyiregyhazi's beloved Liszt hovers behind his very free paraphrases, most notably in Il trovatore. Much of his playing comes close to caricature with 'wounded lion' virtuoso uproars followed by colossal inflations of even the simplest melodic line. But—and it is a very big but—there is also an epic stillness and grandeur that do indeed evoke the past. The disregard for all pianistic nicety or convention is total, and in Nyiregyhazi's ruminations on Wagner's Rienzi and Lohengrin there is a quality that no true musician can ignore. Remarkably, Nyiregyhazi transcends as well as reflects the chaotic nature of his life and one can easily discern the influence of Paderewski, always among his greatest idols (''he was not a technician, but it did not matter''). His special affection for both the Busoni and Brahms First Concertos is also entirely understandable and many of us would have given an arm and a leg to have heard him in these pieces when in his prime. A record of Liszt's Les jeux d'eau a la Villa d'Este made at Gloria Swanson's home (she of Sunset Boulevard fame) has not been found but this recording, excellently transferred, together with some earlier American Columbia issues, form an intriguing if bewildering tribute to Nyiregyhazi's heavily tarnished glory.'