There are recordings you don't simply play, but enter, like you enter a church where the light is already fading. Franz Liszt: Piano Music Vol. 1 by pianist Eunhee Baek is such a recital: not a program aimed at virtuosic astonishment, but a carefully constructed journey through forty years of composition. It spans an arc from the Trois Apparitions of 1834, in which the young Franz Liszt (1811-1886) appropriates for the first time a completely personal poetic language of his own, to the Third Year of the Années de pèlerinage, completed in the shadow of Wagner's death and barely three years before Liszt's own. Between these two poles lies not only a composer's life, but also a love: that for Marie d'Agoult, who made her entrance in 1832 as "a strange apparition" into the existence of the twenty-three-year-old Liszt, and whose death in 1876 definitively closed an era.
Baek, born in Seoul and trained at the Berlin Universität der Künste, the Mozarteum in Salzburg and the Accademia in Imola with Boris Petrushansky, has devoted herself for years to Liszt's complete piano works. You hear that devotion. Where many Liszt interpretations get stuck in outward display – the virtuosic brilliance that degrades the instrument to a spectacle – Baek consistently chooses the inside of the score. Her touch is never intrusive; she lets the music breathe rather than shine. Her toucher is exceptionally refined; from the first measures you feel that here is a pianist who does not want to impress the listener, but to take them along in a carefully told musical story. Remarkable too is how effortlessly she overcomes the notorious technical difficulties. Virtuosity is continually present, but is completely subordinated to the musical idea.
This approach is immediately evident in the opening Apparitions. The first, really little more than a recorded improvisation, unfolds in this reading as a dream still inventing itself: vaguely outlined, almost impressionistic, until an Italian-tinged barcarole melody suddenly steps clearly forward, only to dissolve again in the harmonic haze. The second Apparition, a fleeting musical fantasy of barely a few minutes, tumbles past as a surge that cannot be held. Only in the closing Schubert fantasy does Baek truly let her fingers loose, without ever betraying the capricious, improvising spirit of the whole.
Forty years later – and that is the actual journey this CD undertakes – little remains of that sensual surrender. The faith, shared with Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, permeates the late Liszt, and Baek senses that infallibly without ever laying it on thick. In Sunt lacrymae rerum and the Marche funèbre – two death meditations, one dedicated to the fallen Hungarian patriots of 1848-49, the other to the murdered Emperor Maximilian of Mexico – her playing sounds sober, almost ascetic, as if every superfluous note would be a betrayal of the grief that lies beneath. It is Liszt at his darkest, and Baek resists the temptation to make that darkness more beautiful than it is.
Between this darkness stand the two Cyprès pieces and the Jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este, and it is precisely there that this recording shows its heart. The Cyprès pieces, inspired by the centuries-old cypresses of the Villa d'Este, sound here like weathered, singing trunks – the chords lie open and wounded, as if they already point forward to Wagner's Tristan. Precisely in these pages does Liszt show himself at his most modern. The harmonic daring, the open chords and the unresolved tensions already open a window onto the musical world of Debussy, Scriabin and even Bartók, without Baek wanting to ostentatiously display that modernity. Against this stands the Jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este, one of the late, monumental highlights of Liszt's pianistic oeuvre. In Baek's hands it becomes an absolute spot of light: the water splashes, sparkles and bursts apart, while the famous reference to John 4:14 – about the living water that wells up to eternal life – becomes almost audible. Seldom does redemption sound so natural, so unwilled or sought.
L'Angelus and the concluding Sursum Corda, which frame the album, show a Liszt who has shed all superfluity. Baek lets the distant bells of L'Angelus fade away with a restrained emotion that does not tend toward sentiment, and in Sursum Corda she finds precisely the right balance between trumpet fanfare and inner conviction – not triumphant fireworks, but a quiet, almost bashful faith that nevertheless knows how to elevate itself.
The recording quality also contributes essentially to the persuasiveness of this recital. Da Vinci Classics opts for a warm, natural piano sound in which no detail is lost. The dynamic shadings of Baek's playing remain completely intact, while the quieter passages also receive all the space to retain their tension.
The programmatic concept is perhaps the greatest merit of this CD: the chosen works do not form a selection of well-known Liszt pages, but a carefully constructed spiritual biography in which the listener witnesses step by step a composer who directs his gaze ever further inward – from the unguarded ecstasy of the young lover to the resigned introspection of the old master. It is a journey that demands attention, silence in the room, the switching off of everything that distracts – but whoever takes that trouble is amply rewarded. An intense, thoughtful and genuinely moving homage to a composer for whom the piano, as Jean-Yves Clément aptly writes, remained a confessor to the end.