SASKIA GIORGINI
Liszt: Consolations, Légendes, Liebesträume, Valses-Caprices etc Pentatone PTC5187045
Along with Mariam Batsashvili and Mark Viner, Saskia Georgini is one of the youngergeneration pianists taking Liszt seriously (an attitude accented here by a beautifully prepared Bösendorfer) and presenting him to a new generation of listeners for whom Cziffra’s flights of fancy and Bolet’s steelspun poetry are not even distant memories (though YouTube is proving a great leveller in this regard). She persuasively weaves the six opening into a span of deepening prayerful contemplation, hardly less ‘spiritual’ in effect than the overt mysticism of the which close out the album withNo 3 is all the more affecting for its simplicity, but the show that she can thunder and tease with the best Lisztians of the past. No 1 is all impish delight in virtuosity while the ‘melancolique’ aspect of No 2 is thoughtfully underplayed rather than indulged.
