In Co n c e r t • Vo l u m e 2 ‘Co n c e r t o s ’

SERGEI RACHMANINOFF No. 3 in D minor Op. 30 1 Allegro ma non tanto...... 15:43 2 ...... 10:09 3 Finale (Ala breve)...... 13:38

CARL MARIA VON WEBER 4 Konzertstück, Op. 79...... 15:43

FRANZ LISZT 5 Hungarian Fantasy, S. 123...... 15:00

Total Time: 70:33

- 2 - The three pieces presented on this CD were written by composers whose lives together span the entire length of the Romantic period, beginning with (1786-1826), who flourished at the outset of the era, continuing with (1811-1886) who was born fifteen years before Weber died, and ending with (1873-1943) who was born thirteen years before Liszt died, and whose work constitutes the last flower of Russian . All three composers were also extraordinary pianists, equipping them the better to compose idiomatically for the instrument and exploit its most extreme subtleties. Each had very large hands as well. Moreover, all three composed their piano works for their own use on stage, and all three were conductors. Through their overlapping years, and their influence upon each other, we thus have a representative span outlining the great period of Romantic piano concertos from , Hungary, and . The three pieces in question, composed in 1821, 1852, and 1909, in vastly different styles, amply display the range of writing that we know as Romantic and give us a fair sampling of the Romantic piano and its .

Rachmaninoff: Pi a n o Co n c e r t o No. 3 i n D m i n o r , Op. 30

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), the great Russian Romantic, was born in the town of Oneg, near St. Petersburg. Both of his parents were pianists. In his

- 3 - early years he studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, impressing his teachers by his musical acumen, and playing recitals for musical and social celebrities. Later on, at the Moscow Conservatory, he studied piano with Alexander Siloti, his cousin, who had been a pupil of Franz Liszt in Weimar from 1883 to 1886. Rachmaninoff subsequently studied with the autocratic pedagogue Nikolai Zverev in his highly disciplined home. He studied composition with the pianist, conductor, and composer Anton Arensky, and with Alexander Taneyev he studied and . Only fragments exist of a Piano Concerto in C minor that Rachmaninoff wrote in 1889. In 1891, as a seventeen-year old student, he composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 1, revising it in 1917. In 1900 he wrote the highly successful Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, after undergoing neuropsychotherapy for the depression that crippled him following the failure of his first . In 1909 he composed thePiano Concerto No. 3, which we hear on this recording, and in the same year he composed his fourth and last piano concerto, op. 40, a less successful work, which he revised in 1941. In addition to the four concertos, he wrote another work for piano and orchestra, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The second and third concertos are among the most popular of his works. As is often the case with beloved classical works, they have become popularly known, if partially so, through film. Earlier Russian piano concertos had been written by Anton Rubinstein, , and Anton Arensky. But Rachmaninoff was originally influenced less by these Russian titans of the piano than by the Piano Concerto

- 4 - in A minor of the Norwegian composer . It’s “Lisztian rhetoric and elements of its formal design left their mark” (Barrie Martyn) on Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1. In 1909 Rachmaninoff accepted a lucrative offer for an American tour– enabling him to purchase a large car, which he had long wanted to do–for which he composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30, writing the majority of it at his rural villa in Ivanovka and completing it late in September. Although the composition of the work went quite rapidly, he wrote that “I’m perpetually dissatisfied with myself. Nothing but continuous torture,” and that he was working “like a man doing hard labor” to finish the concerto. He went to the United States by ship and practiced the work on a dummy piano, playing the first performance with the New York Symphony Society (now defunct) under the baton of Walter Damrosch on November 28 at the New Theatre (later renamed the Century Theatre–once described as “New York’s most spectacularly unsuccessful theater”). In January he repeated the work with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of . Rachmaninoff was so impressed by Mahler’s handling of the difficult score that he compared him to Arthur Nikisch as the greatest conductor of his day. He recorded the work with the Philadelphia Orchestra under . The main theme in the concerto’s first movement, Allegro ma non tanto (D minor), is staunchly Russian and disarmingly simple. Rachmaninoff commented that it “was borrowed neither from folk song forms nor from church sources. It simply wrote itself!… If I had any plan in composing this theme, I was thinking

- 5 - only of sound. I wanted ‘to sing’ the on the piano as a singer would sing it, and to find a suitable orchestral accompaniment or one that would not muffle this ‘singing.’” The theme appears in understated parallel octaves in the piano, both at the outset and elsewhere in the work, belying its capacity to generate such a dramatic, large-scaled work. The movement contains a cadenza, for which Rachmaninoff provided two versions, one that is dark and powerful, and the other that has a livelier and lighter -like character. In his own recording of the work, the composer used and preferred the second version, as does Mr. Wild. The second movement, titled Intermezzo (Adagio), in F-sharp minor/D-flat major, with its lush first theme that is alternately anguished, ecstatic and scherzo-like, presents a series of variations and serves as an interlude between the closely related outer movements. The second theme is in a contrasting major mode. After its recapitulation we hear the return of the theme from the first movement. A cadenza leads directly into the triumphant third movement, which is titled Finale (Alla breve)–in D minor/D major–and draws on themes from the first movement. Barrie Martyn observes that in the Finale there is gypsy influence–with its “wild abandonment and excitement”–where it is more subtle and discreet than we hear in its untamed state in Concerto No. 1. The work overall has a finely wrought structural ingenuity, due in part to its cyclical character. Indeed, “Rachmaninoff illustrates to perfection his considerable gift for writing long beautifully phrased , and uses his material intelligently to create three unified movements with a wide diversity of

- 6 - mood” (Geoffrey Norris). It is “superior in flow and continuity to Concerto No. 2, more sophisticated compositionally and of greater rhythmic variety” (Max Harrison). It is truly a magnificent work, although a reviewer from the New York Sun, hearing the first performance, wrote that it was “sound, reasonable music... though not a great nor memorable proclamation.... The concerto was too long and lacked rhythmic and harmonic contrast between the first movement and the rest.” Some pundits called it a “half-an-hour of padding,” “genteel vulgarity,” “definitely not highly distinguished music.” Others made the absurd claim that it was merely a rewriting of the second piano concerto. Eric Blom wrote: “The third pianoforte Concerto was on the whole liked by the public only because of its close resemblance to the second...” Rachmaninoff did authorize several cuts in the work and preferred to perform it with his suggested cuts. For the first fifty years of its life, the cuts were generally observed in performance, but today it is usually played complete. In this recording by we hear the work in its entirety. The third concerto is a favorite of performers in piano competitions who use it as a display vehicle–because of the virtuosic demands it places on the performer. But pianists who fail to penetrate the symphonic depth of the work do it a considerable disservice. Indeed it is among the most difficult concertos of the standard piano repertoire, giving pianists cause not only to revere it, but to fear it. Pianist Jósef Hofmann, the dedicatee of the work, never performed it, and Gary Graffman lamented he had not learned it as a student, when he was

- 7 - “still too young to know fear.” In this remarkable recording Mr. Wild exploits its musical scope to a richly intelligent degree. As a pianist, Rachmaninoff had exceedingly large hands and a prodigious musical memory, not to mention a truly phenomenal keyboard technique. He played with clarity and definition, his rhythms precise and his legato elegant. In addition to his own works and the standard nineteenth-century repertoire, he performed works by Beethoven, Borodin, Chopin, Debussy, Grieg, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Weber. Exiled to the United States after the Russian Revolution, Rachmaninoff lived in Beverly Hills, California until his death by cancer in the spring of 1943.

Weber: Ko n z e r t s t ü ck , Op. 79

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) was born in Eutin, near Lübeck in northern Germany, and died at age 39 in , of tuberculosis. In his early years he traveled with his father’s theatrical company and assumed several appointments. He studied with the Austrian Johann , the younger brother of Franz . At age twenty he was appointed director of the opera house in Breslau. He later held a position in Stuttgart as the private secretary of Duke Ludwig, the younger brother of King Friedrich of Württemberg, and was director of the operas in and . In Dresden he served as Royal Saxon Kapellmeister and director of the opera. He was a

- 8 - composer, conductor, pianist, guitarist, lithographer, and critic. For his operatic compositions, and for his career as the conductor at so many important opera houses, Weber is known as the father of German opera (to be distinguished from Italian opera). One of his juvenile efforts in the genre was Das Waldmädchen, a proto-Romantic opera that he wrote in 1800 when he was thirteen years old. He also wrote Euryanthe (1823), Oberon (1826), and the folkloric Der Freischütz (1821), an immensely popular work, which is considered the first important German opera. At the same time, his work in all genres has earned him the title, among some, as the leading exponent of early Romanticism in music. was greatly influenced by Weber. In addition to his works for the stage, Weber composed orchestral works and concerted works with orchestra, chamber works, works for solo piano and piano four hands, chamber works, works for wind ensemble and vocal ensemble, plus arias and duets, sacred and secular choral music, and incidental music for plays. In 1815 Weber was working in Prague as the director of the opera. It was a difficult time for him, as his audiences failed to appreciate his effort to reform the opera. He felt that of “the truly great things in the music–they understand nothing.” Even so, he saw the emerging middle class as the primary audience of the new century, and attempted to raise their appreciation for music that was more artful than entertaining, elevating waltzes and folksongs, for example, to a higher level. At the same time his relationship with Caroline Brandt was in turmoil. His

- 9 - letters to her, as the historian Philipp Spitta notes, “reveal a depth of despair about his talent and his purpose as an artist which he did not uncover to any other correspondent.” Two years later they were married. Despite his difficulties in 1815, Weber began work that year on a projected third piano concerto to which he intended to take a novel approach. On March 14, 1815 he wrote to critic Johann Friedrich Rochlitz:

I have an F-minor piano concerto planned. But as concertos in the minor without definite, evocative ideas seldom work with the public, I have instinctively inserted into the whole thing a kind of story whose thread will connect and define its character–moreover, one so detailed and at the same time dramatic that I found myself obliged to give it the following headings: Allegro, Parting. Adagio, Lament. Finale, Profoundest misery, consolation, reunion, jubilation.

In thus giving the work even the sparest evidence of a story line–a parting, a lament, and profoundest misery–Weber was appealing to his middle-class audiences and showing interest in what we know as , which is intended to evoke extra-musical ideas, scenes, moods, or narratives. It was popular especially in nineteenth-century Europe and contrasts with absolute music, which lacks any overt reference to the outside world. But as Weber wrote to Rochlitz, he did not want his suggestion of emotional states to be taken as imitative tone-painting. He abandoned work on the concerto for

- 10 - nearly six years. He resumed work on the piece in February of 1821, eventually calling it Konzertstück. He completed it on June 18, 1821, the same day as the triumphant premiere of his greatest opera, Der Freischütz–which he conducted in Berlin at the Schauspielhaus–and that morning played the Konzertstück for his wife Caroline and his young English pupil Julius Benedict. He is reported to have given them the following program:

(F minor: Larghetto affetuoso) The lady sits in her tower: she gazes sadly into the distance. Her knight has been for years in the Holy Land: shall she ever see him again? Battles have been fought; but no news of him who is so dear to her. In vain have been all her prayers. (F minor: Allegro passionato) A fearful vision rises to her mind;–her knight is lying on the battlefield, deserted, and alone; his heart’s blood is ebbing fast away. Could she but be by his side!–could she but die with him! What glimmers in the sunlight from the wood? What are those forms approaching? (C major: Tempo di marcia) Knights and squires with the cross of the Crusades, banners waving, acclamations of the people: and there!–it is he! She sinks into his arms. Love is triumphant. (F major: Presto giocoso) Happiness without end. The very woods and waves sing the song of love; a thousand voices proclaim its victory.

Benedict allegedly relayed the program to Weber’s son Max Maria, suggesting

- 11 - that Weber had relented to the impulse to give the work a serious program, and thus passing the narrative down through subsequent generations. But Weber himself never gave public authority to the story line, and never had it printed, not wanting to be misunderstood or labeled a charlatan. Certainly the listener should not expect the score to illustrate particular moments of the narrative. Weber’s story line, however, is similar to other works of the period, including Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” Piano Sonata, Op. 81b. Weber composed fifteen concerted works, eight of which he titled either “concerto,” “concertino,” or konzertstück: one each for or French , three for , and three for piano. Konzertstück, Op. 79 was the last of the concerted piano works, and the last of the eight to be composed. The works titled “concerto” are composed along traditional lines and have the usual three movements, including an Allegro with double exposition, a slow middle movement, and a finale, usually in rondo form. But the works titled “concertino” or konzertstück follow a more innovative structure. In the case of Konzertstück, Op. 79, Weber conflated the three-movement form into a single movement having four sections (as shown above) and no breaks. It is generally considered to have had a precedent in ’s Violin Concerto No. 8 in A minor, Op. 47 (published in 1816). Weber himself premiered Konzertstück on June 25, 1821, at a farewell concert in Berlin, one week after the premiere of Der Freischütz, the audience reacting, in Weber’s words, “with monstrous acclaim.” Franz Liszt was influenced by Konzertstück and was among many to

- 12 - acknowledge Weber’s composition as the first one-movement piano concerto in history. It requires a brilliant technique from the pianist, and Weber was among few who could play it. As Julius Benedict wrote: “Having the advantage of a very large hand, and being able to play tenths with the same facility as octaves, Weber produced the most startling effects of sonority and possessed the power, like Rubinstein, to elicit an almost vocal quality of tone where delicacy or deep expression were required.” Liszt performed the work several times himself. It even served as a model for his own one-movement Piano Concerto No. 2 in A major, he also wrote an arrangement of it for piano. Around the time of its premiere, Weber began to curtail his career as a virtuoso pianist. The progress of his tuberculosis was such that he wrote his last will and testament on July 21, 1821, only a month after he premiered Konzertstück, and he was bedridden by October 1821, largely abandoning his compositional work along with his performing career. His only subsequent work for piano was the Fourth Piano Sonata in E minor (1822). He died of the disease four years later and is buried in Dresden.

Liszt: Hu n g a r i a n Fa n t a s y , S. 123

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was born into an ethnic Hungarian family in Raiding, in the Kingdom of Hungary, which was then part of the Habsburg Empire, and today a part of Austria. German was his native tongue. A child

- 13 - prodigy, he studied the piano with , who had been a pupil of Beethoven, and he studied composition with , Anton Reicha, and Ferdinando Paer. His public debut took place in in 1822, when he was only eleven years old. Denied entrance into the piano class at the Paris Conservatory, because he was not French, he continued his piano studies with his father Adam. He experimented with large-scale structures and invented the term “” for orchestral works that did not follow traditional forms and were generally based on a literary or pictorial program. He enjoyed a legendary reputation and a dazzling career as a virtuoso pianist and composer, and died in Bayreuth as a result of pneumonia. Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies are a set of nineteen very difficult pieces for solo piano based on Hungarian folk melodies, some of them composed between 1846 and 1853, and others between 1882 and 1885. During his lifetime the Rhapsodies were among his most popular works. Many of the Hungarian melodies found in them were not actually folk melodies but were in fact composed by members of the Hungarian upper middle class and often played by gypsy bands. In his own day there was confusion even within Hungary itself as to what distinguished gypsy music from Hungarian. The Rhapsody No. 2 is certainly the most famous of his set of nineteen today, having accompanied the antics of Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, and Woody Allen, and being featured in the 1937 film “One Hundred Men and a Girl,” among dozens of cartoons and movies. Numbers 6 and 10 are also well-known. Earl Wild has performed Rhapsodies 2, 4, 6, and 12 numerous times in

- 14 - concert throughout his life. His performance of the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 4 in E-flat major was included on the 1994 two-CD set by Video Artists International titled Liszt’s 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies Played by 19 Great Pianists. Among the other pianists on the recording are György Cziffra, Alfred Cortot, Claudio Arrau, and Shura Cherkassky. Awarded a 1995 “Grand Prix International du Disque,” the recordings constitute “a splendid release that should be owned by every Liszt fan.” On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the death of Franz Liszt, in 1986, Earl Wild was awarded a Liszt Medal by the People’s Republic of Hungary in recognition of his long and devoted association with this great composer’s music. There are many groups and sub-groups of itinerant gypsies. They are found in Europe, including Ireland and Scandinavia, as well as the Middle East and South Asia. Hungarian gypsies had a past residence in Romania. Regional styles of gypsy music can be identified, but “even within these there are still persistent differences according to descent and community.” Beneath them, however, as Groves tells us, “lie shared socio-cultural values, which are responses to pressures for assimilation and constant persecution from different ‘host’ societies. They include a lack of shared homeland; a strong emphasis on the importance of an individual’s descent; economic dependence through mainly autonomous occupations; an explicit ‘purity’ system to mark social and other boundaries between Gypsies and non-Gypsies as well as between different Gypsy groups; a non-possessional attitude to property; and a social memory that concentrates largely on history within living memory while mythologizing older events.”

- 15 - Liszt’s visit to Hungary in 1839-1840, the first since his boyhood, was an important event in his life, as it renewed his interest in the music of the gypsies. He even wrote a book on the subject, entitled The Gypsies and Their Music in Hungary. Hungarian songs, Liszt wrote, “became the blood of my soul–an admirable and magnificent kaleidoscope: sadness, sorrow, suffering, depth of spirit, pathos, gracefulness, reverie, gravity.” According to David Ewen, it was Liszt who established the rhapsody form and popularized the name “Rhapsody,” although it was Johann Wenzel Tomaschek (1774-1850) who composed the first musical work to bear the name, having written six rhapsodies for the piano. Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, S244/14 in F minor (1846-1853), for solo piano, published in 1853 and dedicated to Hans von Bülow, has the following sections: Lento quasi marcia funebra; Allegro eroico; Poco allegretto; Allegro; Allegretto alla zingarese; Allegro vivace; Vivace assai; Più allegro. The work is improvisatory in nature, and true to its character as a Lisztian rhapsody, it offers a contrast between slow and languorous sections and sections that are passionate and full of abandon. Between 1857 and 1860, Liszt and his student Albert Franz Doppler arranged six of the piano Rhapsodies for orchestra (without piano), namely, numbers 2, 5, 6, 9, 12, and 14, but these versions were arranged in the following order: 14, 2, 6, 12, 5, and 9, the fourteenth piano Rhapsody now being the first orchestral Rhapsody, but known as the Hungarian Fantasy. Doppler was a virtuoso flutist and a composer of music for the , but he is perhaps best

- 16 - known as Liszt’s collaborator in the orchestral arrangements of the Rhapsodies. Liszt’s role in this effort has never been completely clarified. He wrote in his will that the Rhapsodies were orchestrated by Doppler but revised by himself, and he complimented Doppler on his work. But Liszt’s own expanded arrangement of No. 14 for piano and orchestra is known as The Hungarian Fantasy, S123, otherwise known as Fantasia on Hungarian Folk Themes (original title: Fantasie über ungarische Volksmelodien). It was composed between 1849 and 1852, premiered in 1853 in Pest (now part of Budapest) by pianist Hans von Bülow under the baton of Franz Erkel, and published in 1864. It is, in effect, a one-movement concerto, like Weber’s Konzertstück. Contrasting with the long-short-short-long pattern are the dotted, rocking rhythms of varying intervals. In 1874 Liszt also made an arrangement of the fourteenth Rhapsody for four-hand piano (published in 1875). On this recording, made in 1980, Earl Wild performs The Hungarian Fantasy, under conductor Larry Newland, with brilliance and irrepressible energy. Indeed Igor Kipnis wrote that Mr. Wild was among those “dare-devil Lisztians” who played with “rhetorical panache and flamboyant bravura.” A later performance of the work is available on YouTube, where Wild appears with Paul Polivnick conducting the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, in 1989. Moreover, Mr. Wild performed the work literally hundreds of times over the years, beginning as early as the 1950s when he performed it with on ABC Radio, and leading to performances all over the world, including Hong Kong, London, Canada, Argentina, and Japan. He recorded the work for Reader’s Digest in 1963,

- 17 - which made it available to the public on LP through Quintessence Records in the mid seventies. In 1969 he performed the work under with the American Symphony Orchestra, at Carnegie Hall. He also recorded it with Andre Kostalanetz in 1970 for Columbia Records. © 2009 James E. Frazier

EARL WILD BIOGRAPHY:

Earl Wild is a pianist in the grand Romantic tradition. Considered by many to be the last of the great Romantic pianists, this eminent musician is known in- ternationally as one of the last in a long line of great virtuoso pianist / composers. Often heralded as a super virtuoso and one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest pianists, Earl Wild is a legendary figure who has performed throughout the world for over eight decades. Major recognition is something Mr. Wild has received numerous times in his long career. He was included in the Philips Records series entitled The Great Pianists of the 20th Century with a double disc devoted exclusively to piano tran- scriptions. He has been featured in TIME Magazine on two separate occasions, most recently in December of 2000 honoring his eighty-fifth birthday. Earl Wild was born on November 26, 1915 in , . As a child his parents would often play opera overtures (such as the one from Bellini’s Norma) on their Edison phonograph. At three, he would go to the family piano, reach up to the keyboard, find the exact notes, and play along in the same key.

- 18 - At this early age, he displayed the rare gift of absolute pitch. This and other feats labeled him a child prodigy and led immediately to piano lessons. At six, he had a fluent technique and could read music easily. Before his twelfth birthday, he was accepted as a pupil of the famous teacher Selmar Janson, who had studied with d’Albert and Scharwenka, both students of the great virtu- oso pianist / composer Franz Liszt. He was placed into a program for artistically gifted young people at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Tech -- now Carnegie Mellon Uni- versity, where he graduated in 1937. By nineteen, he was a concert hall veteran. He was invited at the age of twelve to perform on radio station KDKA in Pitts- burgh (the first radio station in the United States). Mr. Wild made such an im- pression that he was asked to work for the station on a regular basis for the next eight years. Mr. Wild was only fourteen when he was hired to play the Piano and Celeste in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under the batons of many different conductors; Otto Klemperer and Fritz Reiner being two of the more well-known personalities. Mr. Wild’s also studied with Egon Petri, a student of ; the French pianist Paul Doguereau, a pupil of Paderewski and Long; Helene Barere, the wife of the famous Russian virtuoso pianist, , and with Volya Cossack, a pupil of Isidore Philippe, who had studied with Saint-Saëns. At fifteen, Earl Wild gave a brilliant and critically well received performance of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto with Dimitri Mitropoulos and the Minneapolis Symphony in Pittsburgh’s Syria Mosque Hall. In 1937, he joined the NBC network in New York City as a staff pianist. This position included not only the duties of playing solo piano and chamber recitals, but also performing in the NBC Symphony Orchestra under conductor Arturo

- 19 - Toscanini. In 1939, when NBC began transmitting its first commercial live musi- cal telecasts, Mr. Wild became the first artist to perform a piano recital on U.S. television. In 1942, Toscanini personally invited Earl Wild to be the soloist in an NBC radio broadcast of Gershwin’s . It was the first performance of the Rhapsody for both conductor and pianist, and although Mr. Wild had not yet played any of Gershwin’s other composi- tions, he was immediately hailed as the major interpreter of Gershwin’s music. The youngest (and only) American piano soloist ever to perform with the NBC Symphony and Maestro Toscanini, Mr. Wild was a member of the orchestra and worked for the NBC radio and television network from 1937 to 1944. During World War II, Mr. Wild served for two years in the as a musician, playing 4th flute in the Navy Band. He also performed numer- ous solo piano recitals at the for President Franklin D. Roosevelt and played twenty-one different piano concertos with the U.S. Navy Symphony Orchestra in different venues in Washington, D.C. During those two years in the Navy he was frequently requested to accompany First Lady to her many speaking engagements, where he performed the National Anthem as a prelude to her speeches. Upon leaving the Navy in 1944, Mr. Wild moved to the newly formed Ameri- can Broadcasting Company (ABC), where his duties consisted of being staff pia- nist, conductor, and composer where he conducted and performed many of his own compositions – he stayed at ABC until 1968. During both his NBC and ABC affiliations he was also a traveling musician, performing and conducting many concert engagements around the world. In 1962, the ABC network commis- sioned him to compose an Easter Oratorio, Revelations - the first time a television

- 20 - network subsidized a major musical work. Earl Wild has participated in many premieres. In 1944 on NBC radio, he performed the Western World premiere of Shostakovich’s in E minor. In France, in 1949, he was soloist in the world premiere performance of Paul Creston’s Piano Concerto. He gave the American premiere of the same work with the National Symphony in Washington, D.C. the next year. In December of 1970, with Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony, Mr. Wild gave the world pre- miere of Marvin David Levy’s Piano Concerto, a work specially written for him. Mr. Wild has had the unequaled honor of being requested to perform for six consecutive Presidents of the United States, beginning with President Her- bert Hoover in 1931. In 1961 he was soloist with the National Symphony at the inauguration ceremonies of President John F. Kennedy in Constitution Hall – a legendary performance that has been historically preserved and made available through the National Symphony on their 75th Anniversary box set. A common element among the great pianists of the past and Earl Wild is the art of composing piano transcriptions. Mr. Wild has taken his place in history as a direct descendant of the golden age of the art of writing piano transcriptions. Often called “The finest transcriber of our time,” Earl Wild’s numerous piano transcriptions are widely known and respected. Liszt is a composer who has been closely associated with Mr. Wild through- out his long career - he has been performing Liszt recitals for well over sixty years. Championing composers such as Liszt, Medtner, Paderewski, Scharwenka, Tausig, Balakirev, d’Albert, Moszkowski, Hahn and countless others long before they were “fashionable” is part of the foundation on which Mr. Wild has built his long and successful career.

- 21 - In 1986, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the death of the great Franz Liszt, Earl Wild was awarded a Liszt Medal by the People’s Republic of Hungary at a ceremony at the Embassy in Washington D.C. in recognition of his long and devoted association with this legendary composer’s music. In addition to pursuing his own concert and composing career, Earl Wild has actively supported young musicians all his life. Over the years he has taught at Eastman, Penn State, Manhattan School, Ohio State, Carnegie Mellon and The Juilliard Schools of Music. Carnegie Mellon has honored Mr. Wild with their Alumni Merit Award, their Distinguished Achievement Award and an Honorary Doctorate. Highlights of collaborative performances include a March 1974 joint recital with Maria Callas as a benefit for the Dallas Opera Company and a duo recital with famed mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel in New York City in 1975. In 1960, at the Santa Fe Opera, Earl Wild conducted Verdi’s La Traviata, as well as Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, on a double bill with (who con- ducted his own opera Oedipus Rex). From 1952 to 1956 Mr. Wild worked with comedian on the very popular TV program The Caesar Hour. During those years, he composed and performed all the solo piano backgrounds in the silent movie skits. He also com- posed most of the musical parodies and burlesques on operas that were so in- novative for their time and have become true gems of early live television. Mr. Wild is one of today’s most recorded pianists, having made his first disc in 1939 for RCA. His discography of recorded works includes more than 35 piano concertos, 26 chamber works, and over 700 solo piano pieces. Mr. Wild is currently working on his memoirs.

- 22 - Cr e d i t s

24/88.2 Remastering using the SADiE High Resolution digital workstation

Remastering Producer: Michael Rolland Davis

Original Engineer: Peter McGrath

Remastering Engineer: Ed Thompson

Baldwin Piano

Tracks 1-3 recorded Miami, Florida, April 25, 1981 Florida Philharmonic, Antonio de Almeida Conductor Tracks 4 & 5 recorded April 1980 - Larry Newland, Conductor

This recording was made possible through the support of the JS Charitable Trust and The Ivory Classics Foundation

Liner Notes: James E. Frasier

Design: Samskara, Inc.

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