La Campanella -- Paganini, Liszt, Busoni, Hamelin

This piece is really beautiful, and has a great deal of history. It was originally conceived in Paganini's Violin Concerto No. 2 in B minor, specifically in the third movement, a Rondo that was nicknamed "La Campanella" (The Little Bell) because there's a little bell that dings during the main theme. The recording to which I've linked is certainly my favorite traditional rendition, performed by the great Salvatore Accardo. Menuhin does a nice and interesting version but it involves a long cadenza and omits many of the passages I like. It is very showy but you can't argue much with the talent. Anyway, it should be noted that Paganini composed many of his works for violin with the intention of requiring ungodly levels of technique since he was so good and there wasn't anything difficult enough for him.

So then Liszt is inspired by Paganini's greatness (and also probably the fact that Paganini got all the girls) and decides he will develop ridiculous technique at the piano, and ends up revolutionizing pianistic technique just as Paganini revolutionized technique for the violin. In the process, he writes his "Grandes Etudes de Paganini," among which is the lovely La Campanella, which mainly expounds on the main theme of the Rondo and does many crazy things with it, but is also very beautiful. This rendition by Kissin is excellent, but sadly suffers at the very end from wrong notes. I think that is compensated for by the rest of the performance, though, and few others perform it with such brilliance (except Hamelin, of course).

Surprisingly, Feruccio Busoni, who also has pretty excellent technique, writes a version of the etude based on Liszt's that is practically the same but a bit easier, and replacing a few of the passages with re-imagined versions. I actually like one of these replacements quite a bit, and the ending I find interesting as well.

However, then comes along Marc-Andre Hamelin, possibly one of the greatest pianists in the history of mankind, who is probably not human. He has a long history of being incredibly good at piano. For example, as soon as he realized the existence of the Godowsky Studies (which I'll write about some other time), he promptly learned all of them. So, coming to the conclusion that the Liszt etude just wasn't difficult enough, he wrote this version, which is really excellent in my opinion. Not only does it raise the bar on technique for the piece, but Hamelin throws in his own fascinating re-interpretations of the piece, with many dissonant and much more abstract passages and very interesting re-harmonizations of other sections from the original. Also, it has 20 seconds of nothing but F#'s (1:35-1:55) and that part still sounds awesome. That's just amazing to me.