Franz Liszt was a showoff. The Hungarian pianist and composer was an aristocrat, had movie star looks, and talent to burn. Liszt (1811-1886) did for the piano what Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840) had done previously for the violin, which was to turn the instrument into a vehicle of virtuosity. Where previously composers and performers were subservient to the art of music, Liszt and Paganini promoted the idea of "Artist as Hero," with Liszt pioneering the concept of the piano recital. Both men shamelessly promoted themselves with concerts filled with melodrama and carnival stunts. Both were charlatans; both were visionaries. They were the first Rock Stars.
Liszt's piano pieces were composed for his performance pleasure. They were technically challenging, conceived by Liszt to show off his talent on the concert stage. Piano transcriptions of popular orchestral and operatic pieces of the mid-nineteenth century became a chosen interpretive mode for the pianist. Most popular among Liszt's transcriptions of other composers' work are his preparations of Beethoven's Nine Symphonies.
Liszt began his symphonic transcriptions 1838, completing Symphonies Nos. 5, 6 and 7 the former two being published by Breitkopf & Härtel and the latter by Tobias Haslinger. Five years later, in 1843, Liszt arranged a transcription the Eroica Symphony's Scherzo: Allegro vivace which he had published by Pietro Mechetti in 1850. In 1840, Liszt added these transcriptions to his concert lists, giving them ample exposure for the sale of sheet music.
It would not be until 1863 that Liszt would complete his set at the behest of Breitkopf & Härtel. Liszt reworked the original three transcriptions and sped his way through the remaining Symphonies without losing too much of "the Beethoven" in them. However, the pianist was brought up short on the choral finale of the famous Ninth Symphony. In a fit of frustration, Liszt observed that he may have to accept, "…the impossibility of making any pianoforte arrangement of the 4th movement…that could in any way be…satisfactory."
Regardless, Liszt labored on to adapt the 4th movement for single piano, completing it in 1865. Liszt had previously addressed his fourth movement problems in his transcription for two pianos in 1850. But the pianists persistence paid off in his single piano efforts and the full cycle of transcriptions was published in 1865 and dedicated to Liszt's then son-in-law Hans von Bülow. Liszt's Beethoven Symphony transcriptions remain a mountain in the piano repertoire.
Available recordings of the Liszt-Beethoven transcriptions are sparse whether recorded separately or as a cycle. Glenn Gould recorded scintillating 5th and 6th Symphony performances in the late 1960s. It is a pity he did not commit a full set to tape. Of the complete cycles, there are only three. The first was recorded by French pianist Cyprian Katsaris for Teldec in the 1980s and later re-released by Warner Group in 2006.
Contemporaneously, Harmonia Mundi released a cycle in the late 1980s-early 1990s performed by Jean-Louis Haguenauer, Georges Pludermacher, Alain Planes, Michel Dalberto, and Jean-Claude Pennetier (the Nineth Symphony transcription being for two pianos). These performances were assembled into a box released in 1995. During the same period, English pianist Leslie Howard recorded all of Liszt's piano music for Hyperion. The Beethoven transcriptions made a tidy subset to this mammoth undertaking, being boxed separately and released in 1995.
Shortly before Howard completed his Liszt survey, Naxos began its own program for recording all of Liszt's piano music; using different pianists for each release (the label is currently doing the same for the complete sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti). Wisely, Naxos chose a single, singular pianist in Konstantin Scherbakov to perform the Liszt-Beethoven Cycle. Scherbakov completed his cycle in 2006 at which time it was boxed.
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