Yoav Levanon’s cinematic Liszt: the Transcendental Etudes

We heard Yoav Lavanon a the Gstaad Festival in 2023: the report is here. He gave a recital in Verbier, too, in 2019: here’s a video he made about that particular experience:

Levanon styles himself as a Romantic in the present day, and his playing supports that: this is in the Grand Liszt manner. But it is also incredibly varied, echoing every emotion Liszt touches on. Contast the outward-facing Preludio with the flickering Molto vivace (Fusées) second Etude and the expansive, lyrical third, for example. Here’s the first:

… and the contrasting Third:

The fourth is itself a microcosm of this contrasts with its lyrical, Choinesque melodies and its overt extroversion:

The ligfhtnss of the second is echoed in the fifth, “Fux collets,” s light as a feather and impeccably Liszian (Levaon is light on pal hee and yet one one tad machine-like).

With “Vision,” the sixth study, we enter into Liszt’s darker waters, the “Dies irae” very much part of the scenery, its climax announced by thunderous double-octaves:

A muscular “Eroica” cedes to the edge-of-the-seat”Wilde Jagd,” surely the crowning achievement of Lavanon’s cycle, full of melting lyricism as well as white-hot virtuosity:

For all of his prestidigitation, it is the more lyrical movements that impressde me most, a case in point being the fantastical imagination of “Ricordanza”:

The “Appassionata” Etude is I believe a bit of a calling card for Levanon, and no wonder. He is magisterial here:

The cycle could almost finish there. Almost, Instead, we get Liszt in his proto-Impesiosnist guise for “Harmlnies du soir.” just shy of ten moues of heady beauty; the final “Chasse-neige” seems a prolongation as well as fitting close to the cycle. Levanon takes the movement to an exultant climax.

Levanon’s Liszt is veyr special indeed. We have a cracker here.

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