Haiou Zhang plays Liszt with sympathy, affection, and technique to burn. Although Liszt allowed his interpreters textual leeway, the composer also took lots of trouble to notate his scores with pinpointed specificity. It is to his credit that Zhang trusts Liszt, yet is not rigidly literal. For example, he’s one of the few pianists to truly bring out the marcato quality of the right-hand chords in Funérailles’ opening pages, and he does so by paying careful heed to Liszt’s pedal markings and observing rests that others often play through. Zhang’s central octave episode adeptly emulates Horowitz’s steamrolling hands, although Arnaldo Cohen and Jorge Bolet deliver superior paragraphic sweep and harmonic perception.
Conversely, the B minor sonata’s notorious octave passage in the exposition benefits from Zhang’s harmonic accentuation. In fact, the entire performance is impressively fluid and well-integrated; in time, one hopes that Zhang will project the Quasi Adagio’s lyrical decorative flourishes with more affirmation and purposeful shape, or flesh out Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este’s coloristic patterns with Arrau’s burnished clarity.
Comparative listening also reveals Volodos offering more caressing nuance and poetry than Zhang in the St. Francis Legende, plus superior inner-voice characterization and witty timing throughout Horowitz’s tour-de-force rewrite of the Second Rhapsody (to say nothing of Horowitz’s own, incomparable 1953 live recording). All in all, there’s no denying Haiou Zhang’s Lisztian potential, and if you can deal with Hänssler’s slightly boomy sonics (thankfully, not quite on the overly resonant level of their Gerhard Oppitz releases), you’ll certainly enjoy the best of what this young Chinese pianist has to offer here.
