Liszt - Costantino Catena - Venezia E Napoli (Piano Works) download free

LISZT Tarantella de Dargomyžkiy. Nuit d’été à Pausilippe: Trois amusements sur des motifs de l’Album de Donizetti. Soirées Musicales de Rossini: La Regata veneziana, La gita gondola, La Danza. Canzone Napolitana. Tarantella di Bravura d’après la Tarantella de la Muette de Portici d’Auber. Variations sur le Carnaval de Venise. Tarantella de C. Cui. Der Gondelfahrer d’après Schubert. La lugubre gondola II. R.W.-Venezia. Années de pèlerinage, Vol. 2 (supplement): Venezia e Napoli • Costantino Catena (pn)• CAMERATA 15133-4 (2 CDs: 105:46)For his two-disc Liszt release on the Tokyo-based Camerata label, Costantino Catena has assembled a fascinating program that resists the obvious at almost every turn. The two Italian books of Années de pèlerinage, with their Petrarch Sonnets, Dante Sonata, and Villa d’Este pieces, are not represented, save for the ‘supplement’ Venezia e Napoli. Transcriptions, on the other hand, from Rossini, Paganini, and Donzetti, along with Italianate works by Auber, Dargomyzhsky, Cui, and Schubert, are abundant. Rarely encountered pieces, such as the Nuit d’été à Pausilippe and the incomplete Variations on “The Carnaval of Venice,” make appearances in a program that spans a half century of Liszt’s career, from the 1830s to 1880s. Catena, who has degrees in philosophy and psychology as well as a number of competition laurels to his credit, chairs the piano department of Cosenza Conservatory in Calabria. For this recording he uses a Fazioli concert grand.The first disc begins with one of the late Russian transcriptions explored so revealingly in Jonathan Kregor’s recent study, Liszt as Transcriber, the Tarantella of Aleksandr Dargomyzhsky. It is worth recalling that, independently during the 1860s, Liszt and Dargomyzhsky were among the earliest composers experimenting with the whole-tone scale. The Dargomyzhsky Tarantella is typical of Liszt’s old-age predilection for transforming the materials he transcribed with the radical harmonic and rhythmic characteristics of his own late style. Catena’s virtuoso performance sets these stylistic distinctions in vivid relief. From Donizetti’s collection of songs and duets with piano accompaniment titled Nuit d’été à Pausilippe, Liszt chose three for transcription: “Il Barcajuolo—Barcarola,” “L’alito di Bice—Notturno,” and “La toree di Biasone—Cazone Napoletana.” Here, as well as in three selections from the more elaborate and sophisticated Soirées Musicale de Rossini, Catena strikes the perfect balance of sentiment and relaxed charm in readings that could scarcely be more idiomatic. Particularly appealing is Catena’s approach to Rossini’s “La Danza,” taken at a tempo that might actually be danced or sung, rather than the customary rushed, hysterical pace. The program’s sole large-scale operatic fantasy is that based on Auber’s politically incendiary opera of 1828, La muette di Portici. From this prototypical grand opera (which, incidentally, sparked riots that ultimately led to the independence of Belgium), Liszt drew from the act III grand tarantella and the act IV final chorus to create a dazzling virtuoso fantasy of some 10-and-a-half minutes. The best-known recordings of this fiendishly difficult piece are probably those of Earl Wild from 1972 (EMI 586523) and György Cziffra from the mid 1950s (Brilliant Classics 94215/30). Next to Catena’s bravura yet satisfyingly musical performance, the frenzied accounts of both these elder statesmen sound a bit empty-headed.It isn’t certain if the Carnaval de Venise, an incomplete set of variations probably sketched in the early 1840s, derive from Paganini or from some other iteration of the popular melody. Catena revels in the droll humor and far-fetched technical demands of Liszt’s setting, creating a listening experience that’s great fun. The transcription of César Cui’s Tarantella, on the other hand, dates from 1885 and, to an even greater extent than is the case with the 1879 Dargomyzhsky transcription, thrusts open the door to Liszt’s stark, uncompromising late style. This subtly imaginative performance emphasizes the work’s varied coloration and its sinister, almost desolate emotional undertow. The straightforward transcription of Schubert’s Der Gondelfahrer, D 809, for male voices, is given with an elegantly maintained cantabile and beautifully voiced chords. It makes a perfect prelude to the second La lugubre gondel, in a reading more focused on the threnody’s dark palette than its stark rhetoric. In another meditation on Wagner’s death in Venice, R.W. Venezia, the apocalyptic stridency that so often characterizes the piece is avoided in favor of a more subdued, meditative interpretation, with deeply affecting results. Once again inVenezia e Napoli, the supplement to Book 2 of the Années de pèlerinage, Catena exhibits his natural, unaffected feeling toward the music’s popular source materials. The extended trio of the famous Tarantella is almost ethereal in its beauty. This triptych, recorded so frequently over the past couple of years, is here as deliciously atmospheric and echt-Italian as one could wish. All told, this interesting collection, so sensitively executed, offers some quite unexpected and refreshing perspectives on Liszt’s familiar ‘Italian voice.’ Very warmly recommended. Patrick RuckerThis article originally appeared in Issue 36:4 (Mar/Apr 2013) of Fanfare Magazine.