VIA CRUCIS – VERSION FOR PIANO SOLO 1876–79 (S.53)

Via Crucis is perhaps the closest Liszt came to creating a new kind of church music through combining a new harmonic language with traditional liturgy. While the overall atmosphere is restrained and devout in feeling, the harmony underpinning the music is experimental, including an extensive use of the whole-tone scale. While the composer uses familiar chorale and hymn tunes, the overall impression aurally is of an unsettled tonal language. Three of the 15 numbers (an introduction along with depictions of the 14 Stations of the Cross) employ sliding chromatic lines and harmonies; and when those harmonies do come to rest, they are often diminished or unique. Other Stations use successive chromatic chords and may abruptly end on a single tone.

Reinbert de Leeuw (1938-2020) was a well known as a pianist and conductor of contemporary music and was one of the founders of the Dutch Charles Ives Society (1968). He devoted himself with much success to the performance of music by lesser-known modern composers such as Satie and George Antheil as well as to developing alternative ways of performing chamber music during the 1970s. In 1974 he founded the Schönberg Ensemble, specialised in music of the Second Viennese School. He appears regularly as a guest conductor with the most important Dutch orchestras and ensembles and also has conducted various productions for De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam (Rêves d’un Marco Polo by Claude Vivier, Rosa, a Horse Drama and Writing to Vermeer by Louis Andriessen) and for the Nationale Reisopera (Le Grand Macabre by György Ligeti and The Turn of the Screw by Benjamin Britten).

Vera Beths is one of the most important Dutch violinists of the first post-war generation. She has appeared as soloist with all the major orchestras, and is particularly interested in modern music. She inspired such composers as Peter Schat, Louis Andriessen, Geert van Keulen and Philip Glass to write works for her. In addition to classical and modern repertoire she is also deeply involved with historical performance practice. Together with her spouse, the cellist Anner Bylsma, and violist Jürgen Kussmaul she founded the ensemble Archibudelli which was an early music trendsetter in the 1980s and 1990s. Vera Beths plays a Stradivarius from 1727.