This album joins two concert recordings made eight years apart by the Austrian pianist Till Fellner. The first book of Liszt's Années de pèlerinage, Suisse, comes from Vienna in June 2002. Beethoven's last piano sonata, No. 32 in C minor Op. 111, was recorded in Vermont in October 2010. Speaking to the New York Times in 2007, Alfred Brendel, one of his teachers, said he had heard Fellner give "the best live performance" of the Années.
The Liszt was taped by the Austrian broadcaster ORF in the Großer Saal of the Musikverein, with Gottfried Zawichowski and Andreas Karlberger as engineers. The Beethoven comes from the Middlebury College Performing Arts Series, recorded at Robison Hall in the Mahaney Center for the Arts by Mark Christensen. That same year ECM released Fellner's recording of Beethoven's Piano Concertos Nos. 4 and 5, and he was nearing the end of a complete cycle of the sonatas, given in Vienna, Paris, London, New York and Tokyo. William Kinderman wrote the booklet essay.
Liszt's nine Swiss pieces run from Chapelle de Guillaume Tell to Les cloches de Genève, with the thirteen-minute Vallée d'Obermann at their heart and the storm of Orage just before it. In 1855 the composer wrote that he had tried "to portray in music a few of my strongest sensations and most lively impressions" of his travels. Op. 111 has only two movements, a stormy Maestoso and Allegro con brio ed appassionato and the long Arietta, here nearly twenty minutes. Applause and an occasional stray note confirm that this is a live recording, made in a resonant hall that gives a realistic sense of a recital.
Patrick Rucker made the album an Editor's Choice in Gramophone, calling it "important playing of breathtaking finesse and integrity". For Michael Church in BBC Music Magazine, "the Liszt is immaculately controlled, each of the nine pieces vividly characterised". Other critics stressed his sparing pedal and clarity of line, and Crescendo described the Beethoven as marked by elegance and calm.
This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 2511, released on 2 November 2018.
