Sunday Classics preview: Would you like to hear a decent performance of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2? Me too!

Marc-André Hamelin grinds his way dutifully through Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and aren't we having fun? (No!)

by Ken

Tomorrow is Rhapsody Day here at DWT Sunday Classics, and you can't do rhapsodies without passing through Liszt's Hungarian ones, and in particular the grandest of them all, the Second. I'm by no means entirely satisfied with the performances we'll be hearing tomorrow, but at least I can say that we'll do better than this. I find myself shocked that so highly regarded a pianist, with considerable technique to bring to bear, can deliver such a pedestrian walk-through.

Marc-André Hamelin can make lovely sounds playing softly -- a rarer and more valuable pianistic skill than you might imagine -- but otherwise he just plods his way through this great showpiece. It's as if he's trying to avoid any kind of real imaginative flair, any thunder or poetry. The worse prospect is that he doesn't have to avoid those things, that none of them are in his arsenal, or within the range of his artistic ambitions.

Meanwhile, here's an "extra" recording I've got lying around, which didn't seem interesting enough to shoehorn into tomorrow's post but may at least leave a better taste than the above. At least the guy shows some basic sense of how to make a tune sing.


Misha Dichter, piano. Philips, recorded in Switzerland, December 1980

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