I first heard the original piano solo version of the Schubert Wanderer Fantasy at the Conservatory where I trained.  My piano professor in my freshman year played it on her Faculty Recital.  Then a bit later, one of the piano majors had won a regional piano competition and her reward was to play the Schubert-Liszt Wanderer Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra with the Conservatory Symphony Orchestra.  At that time, the piano score was pretty much unavailable because I was interested in working on it myself.  I eventually got a copy of the score through her piano professor, but that took a lot of work.  These days, the score seems to be readily available, finally.  I prefer the Liszt transcription of the piece over the original, I think.  Liszt took part of the piano texture and gave it to the orchestra but kept his transcription very true to the original musically.

The Schubert-Liszt is rarely played these days from what I can tell and the same for the original solo piano Schubert Wanderer Fantasy.  The original is more difficult than the “concerto version” because, as I said, the Orchestra helps the pianist out a bit by Liszt giving some of the piano texture to the Orchestra as part of their accompaniment.

Is there more than one version of this piece?  Perhaps, there may be.  Some years ago I heard a pianist play this and I don’t remember the name of the orchestra who accompanied the pianist, but in one of the last measures of the piece, the pianist played a C major scale (in both hands, an octave apart) all the way up the keyboard.  It worked and I liked it, but it’s not in the score like that and Teo doesn’t play it like that.  So maybe the pianist I heard years ago was using a Version B or something, and not Version A.  With some of these rarely performed pieces, there can be two versions of the piece.  I think that’s true for the Bruch Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra.  There were a couple of minor places in Teo’s version that were different than what I’ve heard.  I assume he’s playing the definitive version.

In this performance, Teo’s playing is extremely clean with very light pedal.  He plays the piece beautifully, without any needless theatrics which are all too common unfortunately these days with the younger generation of pianists who seem intent on trying to make their music, their pieces seem more difficult than they really are to try to impress (shallow) audiences.  Even when Teo is playing the thick chords it looks like he’s playing them lightly rather than digging in.

Also, the placement of the piano in this performance is perfect and exactly as it should be. It’s “inside” the Orchestra, so to speak, right up against the podium so that the pianist and conductor can have close contact and with the First and Second Concertmasters directly behind the pianist.

I suspect the piano is a Steinway & Sons Model D which is widely used in the EU, even though the UK is no longer in the EU.

This performance is with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra with Vasily Petrenko conducting.