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LISZT BICENTENNIAL
LISZT PIANO SONATA MONOGRAPHS Arthur Friedheim's Recently Discovered Roll Recording Gerard Carter and Martin Adler
"[...] Gerard Carter and Martin Adler’s painstaking examination of a reproducing-piano recording of the Sonata in B minor made by Arthur Friedheim between 1905 and 1907 is perhaps the most scientific and unquestionably the most serious study of any single Liszt performance [...]
The very appearance of the Carter-Adler monograph also consolidates the importance of Wensleydale Press as a publisher of independent musical scholarship. [...]" – Michael Saffle, in: Notes (Journal of the Music Library Association), June 2011: "The 'Liszt Year' 2011: Recent, Emerging, and Future Liszt Research" Franz Liszt completed his Piano Sonata in B minor at Weimar in 1853. It met with a mixed reception from the musical establishment of the day but is now a part of the repertoire of every leading pianist and may even be the most frequently recorded and performed piano work ever written. It is the outstanding example of the compositional process of thematic transformation. The grandeur and lyrical power of its themes, based on three motifs so clearly stated at the outset, place it at the pinnacle of the piano literature. Wensleydale Press [Sydney] has launched a series of Liszt Piano Sonata Monographs on special aspects of musicological interest. Each monograph upholds the best traditions of modern musicological scholarship while presenting the contents in an attractive way for the general reader. The launch of the series coincides with the bicentennial of the birth of Franz Liszt (1811-1886). The first monograph, published in 2010, discusses in detail the Hupfeld piano roll recording of the Sonata performed by Arthur Friedheim. For many years the roll was believed to have been lost or destroyed but in March 2010 it turned up in a private collection in New York. Arthur Friedheim studied the Sonata with Franz Liszt who said of his concert performance, 'that is the way I thought the composition when I wrote it!' The only other recording of the Sonata by a Liszt pupil that has come down to us is that of Eugen d'Albert but he seems never to have actually studied it with Liszt himself. (Liszt pupil Josef Weiss recorded the Sonata but enquiries to-date have failed to reveal any trace of the roll.) It follows that the Friedheim roll is an epoch-making find for scholars and performers. The first monograph discusses:
Paperback illustrated 90 pages 210 x 148 mm ISBN 978-3-86931-795-3 RRP EUR 30 Errata for this publication About the authors: Gerard Carter (1943–2024) was the published author of books and articles on the Liszt Sonata and on nineteenth century piano and organ performance. He worked on Liszt research with Martin Adler and Tibor Szász, including the completion of the current Urtext edition, and produced CDs of historic reproducing piano roll recordings such as those of the Liszt Sonata by Ernest Schelling and Liszt pupil Eugen d’Albert. Gerard studied piano with Eunice Gardiner at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and organ with Jean Langlais in Paris. He held the Associate diploma in music (piano performing) and was a graduate in Economics and Law from the University of Sydney. Martin Adler, born 1973 in Kassel, Germany, earned a PhD in chemistry and worked as an IT specialist before becoming a grammar school teacher of chemistry and physics. An amateur pianist and musicological researcher, he has co-authored and published a number of well-received books and articles on the Liszt Sonata together with Gerard Carter and Tibor Szász. He lives in Bonn with his wife and children and collects piano roll recordings of nineteenth-century pianists as well as 78 rpm piano records. Contact: info@lisztsonata.com |