for the piano #2: Beethoven vs. Liszt vs. Schumann

Beethoven has too many stone-cold classic piano moments to be denied, his best work is head-and-shoulders above the other two composers. That said, there is A LOT of it, and a lot of it just doesn't float my boat. The most annoying thing he does is when he goes V-I! V-I! V-I-V-I-V-I! and other variants of a similar aesthetic, this kind of over-insistence; this is what keeps me from truly adoring this composer. I love Waldstein, though.

Liszt I'm not especially familiar with, the piano pieces I know are somewhat trifling in an appealing way, or saccharine in quality. I don't know the major works at all and I'd be interested in recommendations.

Schumann is very, very curious indeed. I play Fantasiestucke at home pretty regularly, and I'm taken aback at how the most marvellous writing can suddenly detour into bizarre babbling. "Aufschwung" in particular has the greatest first two pages in the piano repertoire and then the most banal B-section I could imagine, which trails off into this over-long sinister bore of a section that I have always attributed to "this is where the composer got drunk".

Chopin mops the floor with all three of these guys, he is the greatest of all the piano composers and there is no disputing it. I would even tentatively rate Ives higher than Beethoven for Concord alone, it's my favourite piano piece of all time, except for the fact that it is unapproachably difficult (at least, to me).

Liszt I'm not especially familiar with, the piano pieces I know are somewhat trifling in an appealing way, or saccharine in quality. I don't know the major works at all and I'd be interested in recommendations.

The late pieces are where it's at. Cédric Tiberghien's Années de pèlerinage, troisième année & other late works, which came out earlier this year, makes for a solid primer, but my single most cherished Liszt piano recital may well be Krystian Zimerman's for DG, featuring the Piano Sonata, Nuages gris, La lugubre gondola, Funérailles and La notte.

Chopin mops the floor with all three of these guys, he is the greatest of all the piano composers and there is no disputing it.

listening to a "Liszt in Hungary" set that's got other stuff inc. a really biff-bam-pow Carl Maria von Weber piece and in drops Chopin, Mazurka in B Minor, and he's just...so fine.