David Dalle
Thursday November 10th, 2016 with David Dalle
Zoltan Kocsis and his superb recording of late, experimental Liszt, and finishing off the last 2 years of my funding drive recap of my 22 years on-air.

An enormous thank you to all the listeners who have supported CKCU and my program over the past 3 weeks! Today, we will sit back and mostly let the music play. I have chosen more sombre music than initially planned with the sudden death of the great Hungarian pianist Zoltan Kocsis on Sunday. The leading Hungarian pianist of his generation, we will hear his superb 1986 recording of Franz Liszt’s “Troisième année de pèlerinage”. This 3rd cycle came several decades after the earlier two, composed mostly during the 1870’s and published in 1883. Unlike the other two which were inspired by natural and literary themes from his time in Switzerland and Italy, this 3rd year turns towards mournful introspection. Several pieces reference his time spent living at the famous Renaissance villa near Rome (where he spent a third of his last 2 decades as part of his “threefold life” shared with Budapest and Weimar), the Villa d’Este. But as one commentator wrote, “listening to these pieces, it is not the Eternal city they conjure up, not the Rome of Liszt they outline but the Liszt of Rome”, a shadowy, mournful world expressed in strange harmonies and structures unlike anything else any of his contemporaries wrote. We will also begin the show with the final 2 years of my funding drive recap of my 22 years on-air at CKCU, with a choice from 2015 and 2016.