Nyiregyházi's last recording: Liszt: Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este: Thrénodie (II) (Official)

Here is one of Nyiregyházi's last performances, recorded privately at his friend's home in 1984, from Sonetto Classics' "Nyiregyházi Live Vol. 2: Forest Hill Clubhouse 1973 / Last recordings 1984" (SONCLA005).

This album is available from:
https://sonettoclassics.com/Official_...

One stormy day in 1984, while visiting Ricardo
Hernandez in San Francisco, he felt moved to
play two pieces by Liszt, which he allowed
Hernandez to record on a cassette. One piece
was the second version of “Aux cyprès de la
Villa d’Este,” the recording of which begins at
bar 28, presumably because the tape recorder
was started only then. The other piece was the
“Song of the Shepherds at the Manger,” an
orchestral number from the oratorio Christus.
Whether Nyiregyházi’s source for the latter was
the full score or Liszt’s vocal score (or both) is
unknown, and perhaps moot: He took enough
liberties with the music to deserve credit as the
arranger.
Both performances are deeply meditative,
improvisatory, as though Nyiregyházi were not
so much playing as musing over the music.
(Performances of “Aux cyprès” typically run
eight to eleven minutes, of the shepherds’ song
twelve to fifteen; Nyiregyházi’s timings are
15: 52 and 22: 59, even though in the latter piece
he makes some cuts.) In these readings, a rich,
orchestral tone and the most ardent feeling—if
not much technique—are still evident. They
were Nyiregyházi’s last preserved
performances, and it was perhaps fitting that his
strange pianistic career should close, at age
eighty-one, with those ethereal A-major chord s
at the end of the shepherds’ song, played on an
out-of-tune piano for an audience of one. (CD notes by Kevin Bazzana, SONCLA005)