Historical Hungarian Portraits

This latest album in the Complete Piano Music series of Franz Liszt is devoted to memorialising the dead. Historical Hungarian Portraits dates largely from 1885 and commemorates significant figures in the country's recent past, including politicians, a poet and a musician. The mood is powerfully sombre. Liszt marked his son-in law

Wagner's death with Am Grabe R. Wagner ('At the Grave of Richard Wagner') using a theme from Parsifal. But the most intense and forward-looking of these pieces is Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, a foretaste of the experimental piano writing to come.

The Hungarian pianist Jeno Jandó is one of the top pianists in the Naxos catalogue. Jeno Jandó is a professor of the Liszt Academy in Budapest.