Liszt Complete Piano Music, Vol. 37: 3 Sonetti del Petrarca,

Naxos’ ongoing complete Liszt piano music cycle reaches Volume 37 with the rarely heard first versions of three Petrarca Sonnets and Venezia e Napoli. The latter’s original incarnation included four rather than three movements. The opening movement features material that Liszt later recycled for his symphonic poem Tasso, with a middle section packed with scintillating arpeggios and rapid unison passages. It is followed by a brief declamatory movement, and then an Andante placido that would grow more elaborate, decorative, fluid, and imaginative as Gondoliera in the revised suite. Similarly, the later Tarantella is tighter and more dramatically cogent than its more diffuse yet no less demanding earlier counterpart. Among the three earlier Petrarca pieces, Sonetto No. 104’s differences particularly stand out from its later, more familiar revision, notably in a long, brooding introduction that Liszt replaced with the terser, agitated short phrases we know today. Making his Naxos label d