Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on the Chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” from Meyerbeer’s Le Prophete is one of the Romantic organ repertoire’s pillars, yet the nature of its keyboard deployment easily lends itself to the piano. While Liszt himself arranged the work for piano four hands, Ferruccio Busoni’s solo version more effectively communicates the organ writing’s dramatic and dynamic impact in pianistic terms.
Garrick Ohlsson’s recording is outstanding in every way. He conveys the opening chorale theme’s “pesanto, molto tenuto” directive without undue lingering or breaking the line, and sustains his slow, flexible tempo in the subsequent lyrical “tranquillament” section by balancing and shaping the four-part counterpoint as if singers rather than strings and hammers were present. Both tonal heft and effortless sweep characterize Ohlsson’s handling of the booming chords and broken octaves littering the first section’s final pages.
The pianist justifies his fluid, almost alla breve tempo for the central Adagio by truly conveying the pianissimo markings that most others play louder. His formidable inner rhythm and long-lined momentum make the third section’s fugue quite a powerful and riveting experience, where the music’s harmonic density arguably registers with greater clarity than in faster, lighter, more superficially exciting recordings from Hamish Milne (Danacord) and Giovanni Bellucci (Assai).
Like his one-time mentor Claudio Arrau, Ohlsson not only projects the Liszt B minor sonata’s grand, theatrical rhetoric full-out, but does so with the utmost conviction and the least vulgarity. As a result, his rhythmic distortions (such as in the fughetta’s opening) are specifically characterized and astutely timed. Ohlsson builds his sound world from the bottom up, bringing bass lines and inner counterpoints to the fore in the exposition and in the Andante sostenuto’s climax. Likewise, the motivic repeated chords in the final octave peroration also get uncommon due. My only half-quibble concerns fleeting moments where certain notes on Ohlsson’s Bösendorfer Imperial Grand slip ever so slightly out-of-tune. In any event, it’s great to have the Ad Nos Fantasy and B minor sonata programmed together. If you like Liszt playing that’s big, thoughtful, mature, intelligently virtuosic, and thoroughly engaging, buy this disc.
