Lise de La Salle - Liszt (2011)

Lise de la Salle’s sixth recording for Naïve comes a year after the release of her highly-praised disc of Chopin. Once again it is dedicated to a composer with an anniversary being celebrated - Franz Liszt, who was born 200 years ago. The CD includes original works such as his Ballade No. 2 and Funérailles, as well as some of Liszt’s numerous arrangements of music by other composers including Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner.

Lise de la Salle was born in 1988 and began studying the piano at the age of four. She gave her first concert at nine, and made her concerto debut in a live broadcast on Radio France at the age of 13. Since 2001 she has pursued an international career that has taken her to such venues as the Berlin Philharmonie, the Hollywood Bowl, the Wigmore Hall in London, the Met Museum in New York, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. At the age of 14, her first recording (V4936) featured the music of Ravel and Rachmaninoff and marked the start of her collaboration with Naïve. In 2004 she released an album of music by Bach and Liszt (V5006) which was ‘CD of the Month’ in Gramophone. This was followed in 2007 by a CD of the First Concertos of Shostakovich, Liszt, and Prokofiev (V5053) with Lawrence Foster and the Gulbenkian Orchestra, which won the same distinction in Gramophone. In 2008 came a double album of Mozart and Prokofiev which was a BBC Music Magazine ‘Choice’, as well as an ‘Editor’s Choice’ in the Gramophone. The year 2010 saw the release of a critically-acclaimed recording of the Piano Concerto No 2 (accompanied by the Dresden Staatskapelle under Fabio Luisi) and the Four Ballades of Chopin (V5215).

De la Salle’s new recording presents a selection of Franz Liszt’s compositions for solo piano that is both eclectic and fairly representative. Large-scale works like the Ballade No 2 in B minor, Funérailles, and Après une lecture du Dante, and shorter pieces such as Nuages gris mix with arrangements of the music of others, including Isolde’s Liebestod by Wagner and Ständchen by Franz Schubert.