Liszt/Gounod: Waltz from the Opera Faust (Leschenko, Thibaudet)

Two barnstorming performances of one of Liszt’s best transcriptions. Both Leschenko and Thibaudet have top-flight hypervirtuoso techniques, and it’s kind of interesting to see how they’re used to such different ends here. Leschenko has a jaggedly white-hot, expressionist playing style – something of a rarity these days, when it actually comes across as quite old-school. This kind of freewheeling style is really dangerous, because you’re always skirting this close to total chaos, but it’s amazing how everything is kept on balance here, and how well-judged the musical choices are. For instance: the startling accents in the opening build up tension leading to the triumphant octave storm, the absurdly fast stretta passage (8:20) is still beautifully phrased and dynamically shaded, and the sudden dynamic change starting from 6:48 leads neatly into the recapitulation of the main waltz theme. In general: lots of rubato, textural fun, dynamic variation (it’s surprising, given the overall impression of constant brilliance that her playing creates, how often Leschenko is playing in pianissimo – 5:00 etc).

Thibaudet has a much less free/rapturous style (contrast 1:15 and 10:33), but he plays scrupulous attention to Liszt’s articulations, and his relative rhythmic stability lets him build into these really satisfying paragraphs of sound (see the first entrance of the waltz for instance, which has a real swagger to it). His filigree passagework is preternaturally even (listen to the silky runs at 14:53), and he does some surprisingly funny things too (for instance: the glissandi starting from 17:00, which are taken softly, with accented first notes).

This transcription is well-known enough that it doesn’t really need an introduction, but it’s worth pointing out how much Liszt improves on the original material. The original waltz is rather bouncy and trivial – nice enough, but honestly pretty un-Faustian. Liszt’s addition of the b6 chord + chromaticism in the opening, plus the thickening of the waltz texture (fat chords, that thunderous low A) give a merely fun theme a kind of danger that it otherwise wouldn’t have. Liszt also adds in some lovely chromatic extensions to the melody at 3:26, which are considerably more poignant than the rather too neat wrap-up the melody gets in the original. In a similar way the transitional passage at 4:42 is lengthened considerably from the original (so that it feels a bit Wagnerian, actually).

00:00 – Leschenko
09:11 – Thibaudet