MUSIC

A previously unknown piano concerto by Franz Liszt is due to have its premiere next season by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, after being discovered and pieced together over the last nine months by Jay Rosenblatt, a Chicago musicologist. Rosenblatt found the work (tentatively dated from 1839) last April in Budapest, Hungary, while gathering materials for a doctoral dissertation on Liszt. An archivist in Weimar, East Germany, had catalogued the manuscript as belonging to an early version of a familiar E-flat Liszt concerto. However examination proved that it had no material in common with that work. The newly discovered manuscript, Rosenblatt said, was “shuffled like a deck of cards” among the known E-flat concerto.