Idil Biret wanted to record the many waltz transcriptions of Godowsky and others. Chief among these was the transcription of the Johann Strauss’s waltz Künstlerleben by Godowsky which she had performed at many concerts in the 1970s and the Blue Danube Waltz. However, there was another project scheduled before that; four Haydn Sonatas, some of the most beautiful among the many he composed. When Idil suddenly fell ill in 2021 both projects were abandoned. Then, miraculously a stupendous recording of her performance of Künstlerleben in New York in December 1975 surfaced on the internet which led to reembarking on the project in a somewhat different way. The result is this album, a compilation of Biret’s past performances of Waltzes and Dances from many composers including Bartók, Berlioz, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt, Ravel, Stravinsky and, of course, Leopold Godowsky – his piano transcription of the Strauss waltz Künstlerleben ‘Metamorphosis on Themes from Artist’s Life’.

‘After the brilliant Liszt interpreter Lazar Berman, now another maestro of the piano with special affinity to Liszt, Idil Biret, made debut in the German Democratic Republic…The jubilant public found itself rewarded with an encore which in itself was even more complex: a Tarantella by Liszt, performed with extreme purity and enormously dynamic staging.’