Liszt: Complete Piano Music - Vol. 11 (Transcriptions of Vocal Works by Mozart, Lassen, Franz, Lessmann and Dessauner)

"Canadian Valerie Tryon plays more transcriptions of vocal music in Vol 11. A La Chapelle Sistine combines Allegri's Miserere and Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus in a 13-minute fantasy. Two movements from Mozart's Requiem, Confutatis Maledictis and Lacrymosa make an apt coupling. The songs by now totally unknown composers Lassen, Lessmann, Franz and Dessauer are performed very tastefully."
- Straits Times, March 31, 2000

"Valerie Tryon is an accomplished and sensitive guide in these wonderful song transcriptions"
- Gramophone

The art of transcription essentially began when the earliest composers took a theme by someone else and created an improvisation or a set of variations. It was not uncommon among Bach's works to find transcriptions of Vivaldi or other composers, re-cast in a different instrumental costume. So it cannot be said that Franz Liszt invented the concert paraphrase or transcription. But what can be said, is that Liszt, like no other composer before him (or after him), expanded, nurtured, perfected, and practised the art of transcription. His influence on succeeding generations of transcribers (Busoni, Godowsky, Rachmaninov, Grainger, to just name a few) was enormous.

During his lifetime, Liszt produced an astonishing quantity and variety of transcriptions. From Palestrina and Allegri to his nineteenth century musical contemporaries, all music was grist for Liszt's transcription mill. Most cataloguers of Liszt music divide the transcription output into two distinct groups - (a) the paraphrases and operatic transcriptions; and (b) the "partitions de piano". In the paraphrases and operatic transcriptions, Liszt allowed himself considerable freedom and fantasy, while the "partition de piano" were essentially instrumental transcriptions were an objective realisation of the original composer's intentions is provided on the piano. All of the works on this disc fall into the category of "partitions de piano".