Yoav Levanon, piano

The »Études d’exécution transcendante« can logically be translated as »cross-border studies« and thereby Franz Liszt chose an eminently suitable name for these twelve short pieces. They are not strictly speaking studies, which practise a particular playing technique, but in fact character pieces, which in each case circle around a poetic idea. Be it a wild death ride in »Mazeppa« or whirring wills o’ the wisp in »Feux follets« – Franz Liszt, known as the piano equivalent of the devil’s violinist Paganini, composed this music for himself using a lot of finger-breaking refinements on the body.

Yoav Levanon, whom Warner Classics contracted as an exclusive artist at just 17 years old, begins the first half of this concert with two romantically dreamy Bach arrangements for grand piano. The following studies by Frédéric Chopin are also far more than mere technical exercises, Robert Schumann even described the first of them as »more a poem than a study«. Chopin dedicated the twelve-part cycle to Marie d’Agoult, the partner of his piano virtuoso colleague Franz Liszt.