Spanish pianist Isidro Barrio may be best known to collectors for his idiosyncratic, highly individualized renditions of Soler’s keyboard sonatas and Bach’s Goldberg Variations recorded for Koch in the early 1990s. A strong interpretive personality is equally evident throughout Barrio’s recording of Liszt’s complete Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses. Despite the overly close-up, airless sonics and a piano that does not hold its tuning well, Barrio’s luscious, full-bodied sonority and huge dynamic range command attention in and of themselves.
Barrio favors massive textures and sustains his generally broad tempos with long-lined concentration and intensity. Listen, for example, to the central build-up in Pensée des morts, or notice the ample, organically proportioned rubatos and gorgeously sculpted chord playing throughout Benediction de Dieu dans la solitude, the three dimensional voicing of Cantique d’amour’s lyrical sections, or the Andante lagrimoso’s shapely, vocally inflected lines. In Funerailles, Barrio proves to be one of the few pianists on disc who takes Liszt’s specific distinctions between sustained and detached articulation on faith, and with the correct dynamic indications. While listeners coming to this cycle for the first time may find Steven Osborne’s more direct and better-engineered performances on Hyperion easier on the ear, Barrio’s Lisztian prowess deserves attention.
