The booklet notes to Félix Ardanaz’s live 2010 Liszt recital emphasize the fact that the pianist was 21-years-old at the time of its recording. Big deal. Hundreds of talented young pianists play the B minor sonata, Mazeppa, and the Mephisto Waltz No. 1, and often on a higher level than what Ardanaz delivers; comb through archive recordings from most recent piano competitions, and hear for yourself. And let’s not discuss his rather snide-looking cover photo. Still, despite close microphone placement that sometimes distorts (the ugly, percussive octaves, for example), Ardanza’s Liszt sonata is fluent, confident, technically fairly solid, and stylistically sound, if not particularly subtle.
Little smudges or imbalances that would have been addressed in a studio recording matter little. If Ardanaz’s full-bodied chord playing and booming bass lines in the D major Grandioso and similar passages make an impact through halfway decent home loudspeakers, I can only imagine what they’d sound like in a concert hall. To be sure, Ardanaz doesn’t match Arrau’s sheen and breadth or Fleisher’s sharply-honed contrapuntal acumen, and many of his loud passages spill over into banging.
Unfortunately, the piano slips badly out of tune in time for Mazeppa. While Ardanaz spells out the opening rolled chords with appreciably varied velocity and takes advantage of the work’s few oases of poetic respite, his uneven handling of the main theme’s middle-register chords is a liability. After a promisingly dashing beginning, Mephisto Waltz No. 1 grows louder and thicker, from the love music’s inelegantly pounded-out repeated-note patterns to the heavy-handed leaps that Ashkenazy dispatched with unmatched speed and finesse. These spirited performances might have been enjoyable enough in the context of a one-time concert event, but I’m afraid their sonic and musical deficiencies will not wear well over repeated hearings.
