Daniel Barenboim's all-Liszt piano recital

Daniel Barenboim is on a roll. The New York Times gave the Argentine-born Conductor for Life of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Staatskapelle Berlin a front-page profile in its Sunday Arts and Leisure section, and the audience at his first-ever performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Metropolitan Opera received him with a standing ovation.

A somewhat thinnish house at "Verizon" Hall (I'd prefer to think of it as Stokowski or Ormandy Hall, if the acoustics were worthy of either gentleman) stood to applaud him at the intermission of his all-Liszt recital here, and again at the end. It can't get much better than this.

Barenboim started off as a pianist, of course, and despite his long conducting career, which began as a pupil of Igor Markevich at age 11, that's always been my mental marker for him. If his schedule nowadays consisted of nothing more than collecting honors (The Wilhelm Furtwangler-Preis; the Principe de Asturias Prize; the Goethe Medal; Commander of the French Legion of Honor; the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal; the Praemium Imperiale of Japan; etc., etc.), he would have more than enough on his plate. So my curiosity was piqued. Concert-level pianism requires a carefully maintained technique— superbly maintained in the case of an all-Liszt program. I still can't tell you how Barenboim does it, but his performance was astonishing, and, for me, revelatory.

The challenge of playing Liszt

Franz Liszt was known in his own lifetime as a virtuoso whose technique transformed the Romantic keyboard, and his reputation survived for generations through his students and those they trained in turn. His own music was seen as ancillary, and, apart from a few showpieces, was relatively neglected. Its technical challenges in part accounted for this: It's easy to look foolish playing Liszt.

But there was also an aura of high kitsch about the music, of overreaching and bombast. Liszt was attracted to grand themes and big names; not for him a Symphony No. 1 or a Symphony No. 2, but a Faust Symphony and a Dante Symphony.

His music gets more respect now. Liszt was in his way as innovative as his contemporary, Wagner; his harmonies can startle just as much, and abrade even more. Still, no consensus places him securely among the 19th-Century masters. He's impressive but not endearing, and he doesn't quite fit. Like Berlioz, Liszt is both central to the tradition and a bit of a sport.

A colt that will throw you

Some of the problem may be ours, but some is his as well. Liszt's music is passionate but cold, and sometimes downright icy. For all its rush and energy, it yields little charm. You can bask if you like in Wagner or Brahms, but Liszt is not a broken colt; he will throw you if you relax the reins.

This makes an all-Liszt program much more than a technical challenge. Barenboim led off with the three Petrarch sonnets from the second Années de pèlerinage album, followed by two other Italian-themed works: the first of the Legends of St. Francis of Assisi, the Sermon to the Birds, and the fantasia Après une lecture du [sic] Dante, popularly misnomered the Dante Sonata.

Petrarch was the great show-off of his day, but Liszt's interpretations of the love sonnets 47, 104 and 23 reflect, their formidable difficulties aside, great delicacy and restraint. The rippling cadences of the St. Francis Sermon are exquisite, too, and all these works, in Barenboim's hands, were nobly expressive and— always a pitfall in Liszt— completely unforced.

The Devil gets the best lines

Not until the Dante did Lisztian thunder erupt. Here, too, however, there was a balancing lyricism in the passages depicting Paradise (a place I'd love to visit, if I weren't required to stay there). As with Milton, the Devil gets the best lines in Liszt, and the last ones too in the form of the tritone motif that is Satan's signature. But Barenboim brought out the underlying coherences in the score, rendering it a compelling as well as a vivid experience.

The second half of the program was an hommage to Verdi in the form of three concert paraphrases, from Aida, Il Trovatore and Rigoletto, respectively. Liszt wrote some 60 paraphrases and transcriptions of popular opera themes— obvious crowd-pleasers in an age before recorded music, but also a quite substantial part of his compositional output. The paraphrases are really free fantasias, and they contain some of Liszt's most innovative writing, as his rival Brahms appreciatively noted. After the relatively introspective works that preceded them, these paraphrases shone with particular brilliance, although Barenboim made a strong case for their intellectual substance as well.

A Schubert encore ended the evening on a softer grace note. Pin this medal on Barenboim's chest, too, for here was one master honorably served by another.