Beatrice Berrut METANOIA Piano Works by FRANZ LISZT

The Swiss concert pianist and Bösendorfer Artist Beatrice Berrut is presenting her newest album Metanoia, with selected pieces by Franz Liszt. Immerse yourself in the mystic sound universe of the Hungarian composer and genius and discover moments of virtuosity, human vulnerability and spiritual inspiration.

Music as healing, music as consolation, and also suffering as a direct inspiration of the act of creating music: at no time has this been more apparent than in the Romantic era, with composers such as Liszt, one of the most contradictory individuals of that period.

The first part of his life was devoted to triumphant tours to every corner of Europe, where he astonished and delighted audiences with his solo “recitals”, for which he composed strong, characterful, virtuosic works displaying his amazing abilities as a pianist. Later his life became more obscure, more visionary, opening the way for atonality, and finally leading him to adopt the Franciscan habit (his “mantle of renunciation”) and withdraw far from the worldly salons that had brought him fame in his youth. His life, with its shift from the glory of playing before aristocratic audiences to years punctuated by spiritual retreats behind the walls of a monastery, may be seen as an illustration of metanoia. In his life as in his work, Liszt managed to reconcile the extremes, thereby awakening archetypes that are rooted in the human subconscious: his music always represents a stylised struggle between good and evil, light and darkness. His writing, which may at times be described as Manichean, nevertheless explores all the pains and joys that a human soul can experience and creates an unbreakable thread between feelings that are very remote from each other. Thus he is in accord with the Jungian concept of healing, in that he “legitimises” and unifies those contradictions by assuming and exalting them. And indeed, what would joy be without sorrow?