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Concert
Pianist Fulfills Fantasy Pianist Teresa Walters has been busy playing Liszt
this year, with a new CD of the composer's later "sacred" music
and a recital of these and other Liszt works in New York City's Merkin
Hall at the end of March. But our next chance to hear her will be in Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, with the Morris Choral Society and orchestra, on a program with Beethoven's Mass in C. "It's a piece that's close to my heart," says the Chatham resident. "I've been focusing on Liszt for the last several years. This concert is just a joy - it's so cleansing, the clarity of the phrases." The Presbyterian Church of Madison is the site of Friday night's concert (Saturday's will be held in Morristown's United Methodist Church). The two churches have quite different acoustics, and quite different pianos, which should make for interesting contrasts between the performances. "In Madison I'll play a 9-foot Steinway acquired by the church at the end of last year and rebuilt," she says. "Saturday's is a Yamaha, which has almost a fortepiano sound. Beethoven sounds surprisingly good, but I don't know if I'd play Liszt on it." Walters' CD, on the Archangelus label, shows a pianist at the top of her technique exploring a little-known corner of the repertory. Liszt, whose unprecedented success as a young concert artist was often denounced as "demonic," in fact had always wanted to be a priest. "He could never completely forget about this dream," Walters says. "In later life he came back to it. He took holy orders, or started to, was appointed an honorary canon and was known afterward as the Abbe Liszt and dressed as a priest." Musically, Walters says, the change was beneficial. "The piano music of that point in his life was brilliant, forward-looking. He finally reaches his full vocabulary as an artist and person, free to express the religious side of his nature. It brought out a lot of creativity that had been hidden. He attained a kind of liberty as an older man."
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