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The excellent concert is currently up on BBCi, here. I do some talking with Steve Martland, questions from Charles Hazlewood. Love the piano concerto. The LPO are a bit sniffy about Liszt. I am not the best commenter on their comments as long orchestral works lose me several times. Stretches of orchestral colour and development often seem to me like Alexander Pope's description of the Alexandrine measure where he says, brilliantly as ever, in his Essay on Criticism full text here:
A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That like a wounded snake drags its slow length along.
In the case of music I always think it is my fault. So the second 'Gretchen' movement does seem to drag its slow length towards a welcome re-entry by Mephistopheles (third movement) who was lurking in Faust (first movement) all along. It is not so much, as I was struggling to say, that the devil has all the best tunes, but that the devil steals all the tunes and improves them.
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