“Every year is Liszt year for me,” noted Dezső Ránki in 2011, the year of Ferenc Liszt’s 200th birthday, but went on to say he was pleased because “the heightened interest means we have more opportunities to play works that would be received with suspicion. So there is a chance to gain more attention for a part of Liszt’s music few have heard and even those rarely, owing to the wariness of concert organizers and audiences.”
Liszt wrote his first twelve symphonic poems in the 1850s, while the last (From the Cradle to the Grave) almost thirty years later. “In the case of the first twelve, Liszt wrote the orchestral and the two-piano versions simultaneously. Later he made a four-handed version for each, many of them only two decades later. This means that these are the latest, most mature versions of the symphonic poems. Liszt was such an amazing expert of the piano that the piano arrangements of the orchestral works were real piano pieces, which represented the essence of the original works.”