Metanoia: Franz Liszt Late Piano Works

When the Demon Shed His Velvet Cloak

In his youth, Franz Liszt was Europe’s first rock star. Audiences wept, fought over his discarded cigar butts, and women fainted in packed salons as piano strings snapped under his thunderous octaves.

Yet in the final decades of his life, that lion of the concert stage cut his hair and donned the austere black cassock of a minor Franciscan cleric. Living in monastic seclusion in Rome and Weimar, there were no adoring crowds—only an untuned upright piano, cold black coffee, and silence.

Yulianna Avdeeva’s revelatory new album Metanoia—the ancient Greek term for a spiritual transformation, a turning about of the soul—leads us directly into that monk’s cell. Named “Recording of the Month” by BBC Music Magazine, there are no sparkling fireworks here; only cooling volcanic rock in the gray dawn.

Gray Clouds and Atonal Prophecies

Decades before Arnold Schoenberg formalized the twelve-tone system, an aging Liszt was already charting unmapped territory on the keyboard.

In Nuages gris (Gray Clouds), Avdeeva’s touch is terrifyingly still. Augmented fourths and diminished intervals hover unresolved in mid-air, like black funeral gondolas drifting through winter fog on the Venetian lagoon.

This is not the comforting melancholy of nineteenth-century parlor music; it is the soul staring into its own abyss. What makes Avdeeva’s interpretation so gripping is her uncompromising restraint—she refuses to cushion the blow, forcing us to keep vigil alongside Liszt through the long night.

Transfiguration in the Dust

Yet across the architectural expanse of the B minor Sonata and late liturgical reflections, a faint ember still glows.

When the final bass note evaporates into thin air, one can almost see the old priest making the sign of the cross in the dark. Applause fades and worldly vanity turns to dust; but what remains after everything is stripped away is the only truth that ever mattered.