This year’s Piano Festival brings a chance to experience and compare Liszt interpreters of all stripes, as represented by such distinctive pianists as Yefim Bronfman, Maurizio Pollini, Lise de la Salle, and Marc-André Hamelin. Here we launch a short new series in which we ask the artists who will appear at the Festival to talk about their personal take on Liszt and what he means to them. First up is Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili, one of the great discoveries of recent years. On 25 November she makes her LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut in a program that includes Liszt’s brilliant piano arrangements of Schubert lieder.

“Liszt is a composer who shows a number of different faces….. The priest, the experimental composer, even the revolutionary hero with a glamorous lifestyle who has enjoyed love affairs with women, in contrast to the more melancholic Chopin—all of these are part of him. The ideal Liszt performer should have a strong bodily connection to the piano and should play with fire, taking extreme risks, instead of being merely clean and quick or even academic—we know that from descriptions of Liszt’s own playing. I think it’s important to read books about him and his intellectual context, and I find it a shame that many young musicians no longer do so. They think that they can practice for eight hours and that’s enough—but that’s not true. Liszt himself also wrote, and for him music was a form of art capable of expressing things similar to what we find in literature, painting, and architecture. The world view of a Liszt performer should in any case be very broad.”
Khatia Buniatishvili in “Fono Forum” 5/2011

Khatia Buniatishvili will prove how broad her own world view is in her Lucerne debut concert on 25 November: Along with Liszt’s “La lugubre gondola” and his Schubert transcriptions, she will perform works spanning four centuries, from Bach and Brahms to Prokofiev and Boulez.