As I suggested in July when reviewing a recording by Annie Fischer, Schubert and Liszt make complementary rather than strange bed-fellows. For Liszt, Schubert was always ''the most poetic of composers'' and Lilya Zilberstein pays eloquent tribute to this deeply cherished view when she commences her recital with Liszt's arrangement of Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade. Her tempo here is daringly slow (7'23'' as opposed to the youthful Evgeni Kissin's 3'25'' on his DG disc). Some will find her performance drags unmercifully while others will argue that Liszt's dissonance and syncopation tell in an arresting and authentic way and that the climax— here allowed to stretch into infinity—has a truly Lisztian expansiveness and rhetoric. In Schubert pure and simple Zilberstein plays with exceptional warmth and breadth, even when she does not always find the necessary degree of impetus for pages alive—in the first and third movements—with some of the composer's grandest, most imperiously thrusting arguments. Is the Allegro vivace sufficiently animated or, to put it in more ethnic terms, does Zilberstein Schuhplatteln with enough Austrian energy and exuberance? Her sprint in the finale's a tempo at 7'50'' and a very marked slowing down in the concluding poco piu lento are further controversial factors but elsewhere all true Schubertians will relish the seriousness of her overall approach and her recognizably Russian, gloriously full-blooded pianism.
Zilberstein's Liszt is again impressively assured and large-scale with special emphasis given to such terms as maestoso and pesante. Indeed, her tonal richness and fullness often reminded me of the late Gina Bachauer at her most magisterial. Given such quality comparisons are perhaps irrelvant though readers will hardly need reminding of legendary Schubert D major Sonata recordings by Schnabel, Brendel, Curzon, Gilels and Imogen Cooper (to name but a few) while Liszt's Dante Sonata has appeared in justly celebrated accounts by Bolet, Brendel and, most recently, by Stephen Hough. Stephen Hough's performance on Virgin (to be reviewed next month), set within a context of elegies and religious meditations, seems to me infinitely more personal and intricate than Zilberstein's even when it is less outwardly forceful and imposing. Lilya Zilberstein is superbly recorded and the accompanying notes are exemplary.'