In old age, as Kenneth Hamilton relates in the informative and entertaining notes accompanying his latest piano recording, Franz Liszt was in the habit of advising his pupils that they might not have much success in playing his own music but that he did have “some modest ability” as a transcriber. The subsequent one and a half centuries have largely corrected that mistrust of one of 19th-century romanticism’s towering originals, and nowadays it is Liszt’s vast array of transcriptions and paraphrases, perhaps, that is undervalued. Having tackled a selection of original works in the first instalment of his Liszt series, Hamilton now turns his attention to some of those reworkings.
