Franz Liszt's transcriptions for piano of Beethoven's symphonies, depending how one looks at them, are either a major event in the history of orchestral music transcribed for the piano or a colossal waste of energy. In their time, they were highly useful for music lovers who had no access to a symphony orchestra and proved lucrative for Liszt, who transcribed some of them twice. In this disc, which constitutes Vol. 23 of Naxos' proposed complete edition of Liszt's piano music, pianist
Konstantin Scherbakov turns in a highly dynamic and exciting performance of what appears to be the later, 1864, edition of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 and his only one of the Symphony No. 8. Of the two transcriptions, the one of No. 7 seems the more successful in reproducing Beethoven's music as it is familiar to most while approximating its sound within the medium of the piano. While Liszt's re-thinking of the Symphony No. 8 in terms of the piano is a more than adequate basic representation of the work, his approach to restating the orchestral texture in pianistic terms is a little too light and classical styled, and sometimes it almost sounds like a Clementi piano sonata.
Scherbakov, though, does no fault by either composer -- he clearly has both in mind as he plays Liszt's transcriptions, and these interpretations are big and bold. Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven haven't been recorded with great depth and
Scherbakov's fine advocacy on Naxos' Franz Liszt: Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 7 & 8 (Piano Transcriptions) may well convince skeptics that Liszt's effort was not such a colossal waste of energy after all.