Soirées de Vienne No.6iii "Nouvelle édition augmentée", S.427 - Franz Liszt/ Franz Schubert

Franz Liszt/ Franz Schubert: Soirées de Vienne – Valses-caprices d'après Fr. Schubert No.6 "Nouvelle édition augmentée", S.427

"The Soirées de Vienne addressed such a real need and an obvious difficulty that their present neglect is quite shameful. Schubert produced several hundreds of short dance pieces for piano, many of them in sets which were possibly intended for continuous dancing or domestic entertainment but which are, because of their individual brevity, the sameness of their length, and their often unvaried tonality, very awkward to programme in concert. For the same reason the few surviving dance sets for piano by Mozart and Beethoven are largely ignored by recitalists. But these dances contain a wealth of delightful music which, as Liszt perceived from the beginning with his customary astuteness, requires rescuing and assorting with discreet habiliments for public use. Liszt concocted continuous suites from selected dances, often making a better point than Schubert did of the sheer originality of them by the use of contrasting tonality, and from time to time allowing himself the occasional variation, introduction, interlude or coda. Schubert’s sometimes rather rudimentary style of piano writing is generously and touchingly filled out without the slightest recourse to the applause-gathering trickery to which many a nineteenth-century piano waltz falls victim. These refined waltz sequences laid the ground for the structures of some of the most memorable of the Strauss waltzes, and find echoes as late as Prokofiev.
This music is based upon Schubert’s dances for piano, the final version of the sixth of the Soirées de Vienne. This edition can be seen to have profited enormously from the intermediate, unpublished version which Liszt made for Sophie Menter. Once again the youthful freshness remains, but many a passage is extended with a distractedness that brings to mind the elegiacally meditative Valses oubliées of Liszt’s final years."
(Leslie Howard)



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