In his later years, Liszt increasingly pursued his favoured causes by using piano transcriptions of other composers' works; and his own symphonic poems appeared as transcriptions from the 1850s. In 1865 Liszt famously complained to Hans von Bülow that “I have better things to do with my time than transcribe, paraphrase, and illustrate, and from now on I will be more discriminating in this recreation.” This declaration, however, was not rigorously pursued, and the lucrative activity continued to support Liszt and his causes all his life. Raymond Bisha introduces a new album of Mozart and Donizetti opera transcriptions by Liszt, performed by Swiss-Russian pianist Konstantin Scherbakov, one of today’s most versatile and accomplished artists.

This project by Alon Sariel and the Kölner Akademie celebrates the versatility of the mandolin on the cusp of the classical period. However, the (hi)story of the mandolin in Vienna is surprisingly different from elsewhere in Europe, and in some cases we are still discovering new astonishing aspects. In contrast to the rest of Europe, Vienna seems to have almost completely ignored the popularity of the new Neapolitan mandolin type (four courses of strings over a movable bridge, tuned as the violin) in the 1760s and 1770s. When this popularity in the rest of Europe started to decline in the 1780s, Vienna suddenly joined the ranks of mandolin-loving audiences.

This podcast introduces two works by Karl Weigl (1881-1949), his Symphony No. 3 and the Symphonic Prelude to a Tragedy. Both were written at the beginning of the 1930s but then suffered from decades of neglect. Weigl drew on the sound world of late Romanticism, never abandoning this aesthetic in favour of more progressive contemporary trends. Happily, his distinctive style can now be savoured in these long-awaited world premiere recordings. Raymond Bisha presents.