Live - in front of an audience, as well as in a stream format - Claire Huangci has performed the work many times in the past year, including at the Ruhr Piano Festival and the Rheingau Music Festival. The pianist had used her compulsory Corona break to intensively work on Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's symphonies, and took the opportunity to record the work in the SWR Studio in summer 2020. The album has just been released by the Berlin Classics label, available via digital platforms.
It's hardly surprising that Claire Huangci was just getting to grips with Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's great symphonies. Bringing the large into the small, transferring the colorful diversity of an orchestra's sounds to the black and white of piano keys, and performing a work alone instead of with a multitude of musicians, are all only logical in times of social distancing. Although they cannot replace the orchestral experience - for pillars of the repertoire such as Beethoven's symphonies, transcriptions offer the chance to hear new things and experience the unexpected.
The piece, with its unusual programmatic movement descriptions, takes us through various scenes of country life, from the awakening of cheerful sentiments to a scene by the brook, the merry gathering of country folk, and the famous thunderstorm to the shepherd's song full of joyful and grateful feelings after the storm - a fitting outlook, hopefully, on the coming year.
Samples from Claire Huangci's interpretation of the Pastoral can be found at this link.Beethoven/Listzt: PastoralClaire Huangci, Klavier
Erscheinungsdatum: 19.3.2021
Berlin Classics, B08T1RVG1F
