Liszt: Vallée d’Obermann (Pace, Korstick)

A masterclass in thematic transformation from the first book of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage. Texturally, lyrically, and harmonically, there’s so much wonderful stuff going on in here it’s easy to overlook how taut and ingeniously put-together VdO is. In short: a single theme (in minor) gets major-ised, and then its major and minor versions become treated as different themes in a four-part form roughly analogous to sonata form (Theme 1, Theme 2, unstable development, steady build-up to climax). Over the course of the work a three-note motif at the head of the theme becomes more and more prominent, until at points the material is reduced into a descending scale (a trick Liszt also pulls off – albeit via a different transformational procedure, and in an more radical fashion – in the Dante Sonata). The miracle is that something so monomaniacally focussed on such limited material manages to traverse such vast musical terrain – dead-eyed listlessness in the opening bars, lyricism in the second sectio