CONCERT PIANIST FULFILLS FANTASY
The Star-Ledger, New Jersey
June 13, 1997
By Peter Spencer

"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 Concert 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 is close to my heart," says Walters. "I've been focusing on Liszt for the past few years. This concert is such a joy. The clarity of the phrases is so cleansing."

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, was appointed an honorary canon and was known afterward as the Abbe Liszt and dressed like 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."