Slightly more warmth and detail emerges in DG’s 20-bit remastering of Lazar Berman’s 1977 recording of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage compared to the label’s earlier CD edition. As a technician, Berman is extraordinary in terms of sheer evenness, control, and rhythmic panache, yet he always channels his considerable craft toward musical ends. It’s a relief, for example, to hear octave passages in Orage, Vallée d’Obermann, and the Dante Sonata shaped in sentence-like phrases rather than banged out. In turn, the Tarantella’s repeated notes sound like quicksilver pearls rather than pellets. Listeners attracted to Jorge Bolet’s suave sobriety in the cycle’s more lyrical, rhetorical selections also will respond to Berman’s similar eloquence in the three Petrach Sonetti, Book One’s opening and closing pieces (Chapelle de Guillaume Tell and Les Cloches de Genève), and Book Three’s introspective, forward-looking Sursum corda and Sunt lacrymae rerum. Of course Berman won’t displace my affection for Claudio Arrau’s more soul-searching inflections in Les Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este, Wilhelm Kempff’s magically shaded Au bord d’une source, or the ravishing inner voices Vladimir Horowitz clarifies in the Petrarch Sonetto 104. Still, this set remains the reference Années de pèlerinage, and my hearty recommendation is clinched by DG’s bargain-box price. [8/24/2002]
