APR’s valuable Fiorentino series continues with the pianist’s long-out-of-print early 1960s recordings of the première, Swiss year of Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage and the Venezia e Napoli supplement to the Second year. Fiorentino was a great Liszt pianist, possessing the mastery of Lisztian rhetoric, keyboard virtuosity, and philosophical depth to place these performances right up there with the best. Abundant pleasures are here: the delicate pianissimos and powerful chords in Chapelle de Guillaume Tell; the liquid lapping flow of Au lac de Wallenstadt; and the artful simplicity of Pastoral, to name only a few. Au bord d’une source is slower than usual, but with a poetry that justifies the tempos. Fiorentino finds the undercurrents of darkness in pieces such as Orage, which are often treated as mere virtuoso fodder, and he makes a massive, moving tone poem of Vallée d’Obermann.
Throughout, he brings to Liszt an elegance shared only by the composer’s greatest exponents. That combination of aristocratic grace and stunning virtuosity pervades the entire disc, including the delightful Venezia e Napoli trio. Fiorentino may yield to Wilhelm Kempff’s captivating simplicity in Gondoliera, but he gives way to no one in the precise articulation of repeated notes at Mach 2 speeds in Tarantella. The sound is closeup and detailed, with lots of presence, barely showing its age except for occasional slight fuzziness at the edges. APR has a brief note explaining that the lost master tapes of Venezia e Napoli necessitated copying from an LP, but no apologies were needed–its sonics are quite acceptable.
