Lisztomania hits Frankly Music

Remember how James Brown used to pretend to grow dizzy and faint on stage, and a couple of flunkies would run out, hold him up and fan him with a towel?

Well, Franz Liszt did something like that in the 1830s. As William Wolfram explained at a Frankly Music concert Monday night, Liszt had a guy sit next to the piano for the whole concert. He didn’t turn pages; Liszt was the first soloist to play everything by memory. The guy was there to catch Liszt when he stood up at the end of the concert and pretended to collapse from the physical and emotional stress of his ardent playing. The guy carried the limp musician off stage. They’d let the crowd buzz for a few minutes, then announce that the maestro had not only survived the ordeal, but would be back to play an encore! Of course the crowd went wild.

Wolfram, a big personality and a big player, is just the guy to pick up on Liszt’s style. He opened with the utterly astounding and nearly forgotten Funerailles, a thrill ride of Dark Shadows gloom, roiling, boiling arpeggios, noble horn calls, furious motor rhythms, dreamy nostalgia and weepy lyricism. When online dictionaries add soundtracks, this piece will accompany  Ro•man•ti•cism.

The fortissimos Wolfram got out of that Steinway in this piece and in the equally stormy St. Francis Walks on the Waves — enormous, overwhelming, jaw-dropping. His readings pulsed with the machismo passion that drove the girlies wild back in the day.

Romanticism had its tender, intimate side, too, and Wolfram got at that in Liszt’s straightforward transcription of the Admonition from Wagner’s Lohengrin. Another Wagner transcription, of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, ran deeper than anything else on the program. Liszt did not merely move as many notes as he could from the dense orchestral work to the keyboard, he made it piano music. In Wolfram’s skilled and sensitive hands, it did not sound like music for something else; it sounded like something new, and something trascendent.

(By the way, Wolfram informed us that Liszt, Wagner’s father-in-law, wrote his transcription before the opera was ever staged and toured the piano version all over Europe. How’s that for an advance marketing campaign?)

Violinst Frank Almond joined Wolfram in Liszt’s Romance Oubliée and Grand Duo Concertante “Le Marin.” The former, an exquisite and tranquil little character piece, intends to charm, and it did. The latter is the musical equivalent of an Errol Flynn swordfight, a virtuoso workout meant to bowl us over with its technical dazzle and sonic force. It bowled us over. Almond and Wolfram showed that they can not only survive any challenges of 19th-century music, but can prevail over those challenges while showing high style.

Almond and Wolfram finished up with music by Karol Lipinski, Pablo de Sarasate and César Franck, all of whom had something or other to do with Liszt. Lipinski once owned the Stradivarius that Almond played Monday; it seems to have remembered his Caprice No. 3, a devilishly difficult display piece for violin alone in the manner of the Paganini caprices. Almond tossed it off with devil-may-care aplomb.

The same went for Sarasate’s familiar Malaguena, Opus 21 No. 1, which alternately pulsed with Spanish dance rhythms and cried out in song. I never drew the line from Liszt to Franck before, but it was pretty clear hearing them side by side Monday night at Wisconsin Lutheran College. Wolfram and Almond played the two Allegros from the Sonata in A. Franck clearly learned some of his piano tricks from Liszt, as well as the compositional trick of build tension by repeating the same fragment of melody at higher and higher levels until the music bursts over the dam and tumbles down in an epic flood of emotional release. Just the thing to get the blood to boiling and the crowd to cheering. It certainly worked Monday night.

The next Frankly Music event is April 16 at Wisconsin Lutheran College. Details here.