Pre-Order: Michael Kaykov – Liszt: Complete Pno Music Vol. 69

From the 1830s onward, Liszt’s compositions increasingly acknowledged poetic, literary and philosophical impulses, often signaled through titles, epigraphs or extra-musical associations. This stimulus would later crystallise in his codification of the symphonic poem, but it was equally present in his keyboard music, where narrative, rhetoric and symbolism frequently replace abstract formal logic. A central expression of this aesthetic is Liszt’s lifelong engagement with transcription and transformation. For him, the piano was not simply a self-contained instrument but a medium capable of absorbing the sonorities, gestures and emotional weight of voices and orchestras alike. His transcriptions were acts of interpretation rather than replication – creative reimaginings that sought the core meaning of a work and translated it into a pianistic language of heightened intensity. Choral music posed a particularly compelling challenge: the task of condensing