Alexandra Kaptein: Franz Liszt: Lebenswanderung
TRPTK

Born in 1999, the Dutch concert pianist Alexandra Kaptein is already something of a Liszt scholar. She's a graduate of the Conservatory of Amsterdam, has won a handful of prestigious prizes, and performed with renowned orchestras, including the Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra. Kaptein's also, however, the vice president of the Franz Liszt Society in the Netherlands and has just issued her debut recording Liszt: Lebenswanderung. Interestingly, the seventy-seven-minute set doesn't feature Liszt originals but instead his transcriptions of lieder by Franz Schubert and Robert Franz. Such a move by Kaptein makes sense considering that almost half of Liszt's oeuvre is comprised of arrangements of music by other composers, including song transcriptions. It's easy to understand how a musician could be captivated by Liszt when his accomplishments are legion and his influence pervasive. As a composer, pianist, organist, and transcriber, his impact on the music of his time and the generations of composers that followed can't be overstated. While these song cycles were created by different composers, themes having to do with lost love, resilience, hope, and despair are common to both, as is the idea of self-illumination wrought by wandering.

Liszt's transcriptions, which began in 1838, are more than rote translations into instrumental form. He established his treatments as separate entities by selecting from the original and revising the song order. To illustrate, he strays from the sequence of Schubert's Winterreise and presents half of the original's twenty-four songs; whereas "Der Leiermann,” for instance, closes the original work, it appears two-thirds of the way through in the re-imagining. His choice of song order wasn't arbitrarily determined, however. As Kaptein notes, each song moves a third lower than the one before, and the harmonies in the cycle's second half mirror those in the first by being transposed a step higher. Even if the listener were to be unaware of such formal connections, they would nevertheless be felt during the performance's unfolding.

One is riveted the moment “Gute Nacht” initiates the lyrical work with its familiar haunting refrain. Memorable too, “Die Nebensonnen” alternates between the hymn-like stateliness of its gentler episodes and the fury of its aggressive parts. In encompassing such a broad array of emotional expression, the work demands much from the pianist, but Kaptein rises to the challenge throughout. She shows exceptional poise in delivering hushed passages with poetic sensitivity (“Die Post,” “Wasserflut”) and louder ones dramatic elan (“Erstarrung”). Her fingerwork is consistently impressive—consider the torrential flow “Der Lindenbaum” and “Der stürmische Morgen” get up to.

Of the two figures, Franz is obviously the lesser known; even so, Liszt's instrumental rendition of the German composer's own twelve songs makes for a satisfying complement to the Winterreise treatment. In helping to get Franz's first book of songs published, Robert Schumann was an enthusiastic advocate, and Liszt shared that conviction. Upon meeting Franz in 1844 and expressing admiration for his first collection of songs, Liszt told him how happy he would be to have a set dedicated to him, and Franz did precisely that two years later with Sechs Gesänge, Op. 7. Liszt's artful 1848 transcription, 12 Lieder von Robert Franz, proved so popular, it outsold the original scores.

July 2024