By Bryce Morrison
Gramophone
01-Sep-2011
A crowning achievement as Lise de la Salle turns from Chopin to Liszt
After her controversial previous disc, a brave if sometimes misguided attempt to invest Chopin with a renewed sense of drama and significance, the wonderfully gifted 23-year-old Lise de la Salle gives us a Liszt recital of astonishing strength, poetry and, for one so young, musical maturity. Whether in fist-shaking defiance, radiance or baleful resignation, she is superbly responsive to Liszt’s rhetoric in the Dante Sonata. Here, as elsewhere, everything is given time to “speak, to weep and sing and sigh” (part of Liszt’s own definition of a true virtuoso). She has all the pace and technique for the ferociously demanding “Mazeppa” Etude yet there is never a hint of extraneous display.
In the Second Ballade she commences its epic story (for Sacheverell Sitwell, less concerned with personal suffering than with “great happenings on the epic scale”) with a wholly individual conjuring of menace, like so much distant thunder, and the final pages have a superb opulence before a coda of a sustained visionary beauty. She captures all the sombre magnificence of “Funérailles” and ends with a memorably full-blooded account of the Wagner-Liszt Isoldes Liebestod. She is as poised and refined in miniatures as she is in her large-scale offerings and, wherever you listen, you will hear Liszt-playing of a special distinction. Lise de la Salle has been finely recorded and this, her seventh disc for Naïve, is a crowning achievement.
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