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When I read your summary (above) of the Liszt/Grieg anecdote, I was intrigued and inspired to do a little research to learn more about the incident. What I discovered on 2-3 sites was a slightly different version of the encounter, as summarized in a letter written by Grieg on April 9, 1870. This apparently took place in Rome a few weeks after Grieg and Liszt had their first opportunity to meet in person. I share it here because it provides wonderful insight into both Grieg's and Liszt's, personalities.

"I had fortunately just received the manuscript of my pianoforte concerto from Leipzig, and took it with me. Beside myself there were present Winding, Sgambati, and a German Lisztite, whose name I do not know, but who goes so far in the aping of his idol that he even wears the gown of an abbé; add to these a Chevalier de Concilium, and some young ladies of the kind that would like to eat Liszt, skin, hair, and all, their adulation is simply comical. . . . Winding and I were very anxious to see if he would really play my concerto at sight. I, for my part, considered it impossible; not so Liszt. "Will you play?" he asked, and I made haste to reply: "No, I cannot" (you know I have never practised it). Then Liszt took the manuscript, went to the piano, and said to the assembled guests, with his characteristic smile, "Very well, then, I will show you that I also cannot." With that he began. I admit that he took the first part of the concerto too fast, and the beginning consequently sounded helter-skelter; but later on, when I had a chance to indicate the tempo, he played as only he can play. It is significant that he played the cadenza, the most difficult part, best of all. His demeanour is worth any price to see. Not content with playing, he at the same time converses and makes comments, addressing a bright remark now to one, now to another of the assembled guests, nodding significantly to the right or left, particularly when something pleases him. In the adagio, and still more in the finale, he reached a climax both as to his playing and the praise he had to bestow.

A really divine episode I must not forget. Toward the end of the finale the second theme is, as you may remember, repeated in a mighty fortissimo. In the very last measures, when in the first triplets the first tone is changed in the orchestra from G sharp to G, while the piano part, in a mighty scale passage, rushes wildly through the whole reach of the keyboard, he suddenly stopped, rose up to his full height, left the piano, and with big theatric strides and arms uplifted walked across the large cloister hall, at the same time literally roaring the theme. When he got to the G in question he stretched out his arms imperiously and exclaimed: "G, G, not G sharp! Splendid! That is the real Swedish Banko!" to which he added very softly, as in a parenthesis: "Smetana sent me a sample the other day." He went back to the piano repeated the whole strophe, and finished. In conclusion, he handed me the manuscript, and said, in a peculiarly cordial tone: "Fahren Sie fort, ich sage Ihnen, Sie haben das Zeug dazu, und — lassen Sie sich nicht abschrecken!" ("Keep steadily on; I tell you, you have the capability, and — do not let them intimidate you!")

This final admonition was of tremendous importance to me; there was something in it that seemed to give it an air of santification. At times, when disappointment and bitterness are in store for me, I shall recall his words, and the remembrance of that hour will have a wonderful power to uphold me in days of adversity."

I'm just as much of a Lizst fanboy as the next man, but some of these anecdotes.

Two more I know are once he cut his finger before a performance and claimed he was going to use another finger on those notes, and the second one was that he sightread Chopin's Etude no 1 in C at reasonable tempo.

I mean I might go with the finger one at a very very long push, but the sightreading one - come on.

Don't really go with the Greig one either. But if any of these are true, then I must say that's quite remarkable.

Well, assuming the letter is authentic I'd say that the Grieg incident actually took place.

For Liszt to sightread the Etude Opus 10 No. 1 at a reasonable tempo would not have been very unusual at all.

Can't vouch for the cut finger story, but the guy was probably the greatest pianist of the 19th century, so who knows??
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History is full of pianists who could do extraordinary things, and as Liszt was famed for his abilities, I have no doubt that he played the Chopin Etudes at sight.

John Ogdon once memorised a concerto on the bus home from the music shop on the day of a concert, after he was asked to fill in for someone else. He could memorise instantly, and play works at sight just as well as the works he had known for many years.

I've read similar things about Walter Gieseking. Some people are just gifted that way, I guess. So no, the Liszt anecdotes don't really seem all that far-fetched to me.

I’d assume the version in the letter, where Grieg brought a manuscript of the concerto to the gathering with Liszt, is more accurate than Liszt taking it into memory from the performance.

I would actually be more surprised if someone said Liszt was unable to sight read a Chopin Etude. This is not saying he played it to performance standards, but played it at a reasonable tempo without breaking the rhythm.

I don't think Liszt would have any trouble sight-reading the Grieg concerto, or any Chopin étude. Do not forget that he was never troubled with wrong notes, and performers of that time never expected perfection (magnetic tape hadn't even been invented yet, let alone tape-splicing, CD's and digital editing....). He'd have played what he was sight-reading at whatever tempo he deemed appropriate, with all the expression (- but not necessarily what the composer indicated) and musicality of a real performance.

Not that long ago, John Ogdon similarly sight-read through Brahms's Piano Concerto No.2 when he was still a student, when a fellow student overheard his playing and wrote about it.

That was the basis of the saturation research paper that I wrote for a class in college. I've alluded to it several times to my students when I forced them to do sight reading during lessons.

Wow. Thanks for sharing.

To try to spark more discussion, who would be the top-10 composers born before JS Bach (Handel and Scarlatti) and top-10 born after Stravinsky?

I’m the wrong person to rank post-Stravinsky composers, but I’ll take a stab at the top-10 early composers defined as born before 1685, listed chronologically.

Schutz
Monteverdi
G. Gabrieli
Froberger
Buxtehude
Corelli
Pachelbel
Vivaldi
Telemann
Rameau

I would substitute Sweelinck for Vivaldi if making the list just for myself, but I think that would be a controversial choice requiring extrapolation of the works we have to the works that were lost, and it is his later (possibly most mature) works that survived. Rameau’s publication of an influential treatise on harmony and Froberger developing the baroque dance suite form were my basis for including them. There are of course other worthy candidates for the list (such as Palestrina, Lully, Frescobaldi, Raison, F. Couperin, Albinoni, Clerambault).

Post-Stravinsky?

That’s so easy! I don’t listen to anything before Bach and after Stravinsky 🤣

No Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Poulenc, Milhaud, Tailleferre?

Nope. But a lot of Shostakovich!

Tailleferre is new to me - although I'm sure I've seen her name in the past in connection with "Les Six." I've just been "sampling" some of her compositions on YouTube. She was a gifted and prolific composer. Thanks for the introduction.

Listening to this right now.......wonderful !!

Violin and Piano Sonata No. 1 (1921)

https://youtu.be/WMBjyFAPJZA

I was not familiar with that lovely sonata for violin and piano, thanks. And I was not deliberately excluding Shostakovich in the short list above. He probably is my candidate for best composer after Stravinsky.

Here is my top-10 after Stravinsky in arbitrary order. (Schoenberg and Satie were born before Stravinsky and do not qualify). I’m not fond of atonal music, so it would difficult for me to rank composers of it.

Shostakovich
Prokofiev
Rachmaninov
Poulenc
Milhaud
Tailleferre
Hindemith
Villa-Lobos
Hovhaness
Copland

I consider Rudepoema by Villa-Lobos to be one of the greatest post-impressionist works for solo piano. I wish I could play it. It was dedicated to Rubinstein.

You could add a very long list of potential candidates to that list: Machaut, Josquin des Prez, Roland de Lassus, Andre Willaert, Purcell, Tallis, Gibbons, Byrd, Morley, Blow, DuFay, Mouton, A. Gabrieli, Claudio Merulo, Anibale Padovano, Gesualdo, Binchois, Ockhehem, Carissimi, Banchieri, Weckmann, Reincken, Fisher, Muffat, Praetorius, Scheidt, Scheideman, D'Anglebert, L. Couperin, Chambonnières, Charpentier, De Grigny, Schein, Biber, Cypriano de Rore, Cavalli, Rossi, and I pass a lot of others. The syle of these range such a large scope that they are impossible to compare.

BTW not to diminish Sweelinck contribution, there was already several keyboardists and composers recognized europenwise as true virtuoso: Anibale Padovani, Claudio Merulo, Andrea Gabrieli. All three from the venetian school and who created the virtuosic style of the toccata, then imitated by many composers like Frescobaldi, Sweelinck, Froberger, Buxtehude, Bach, ...Most composers of the time were also strong/virtuoso musicians on one of several instruments, of which the organ.

To get back on topic, "How Great is Rachmaninov as a composer?" just check out Boris Giltburg's twitter feed @BorisGiltburg or his facebook page. Today he plays Op. 39 Etude Tableaux. There Sergei's composition style is in full display, an imaginative tonal display of dark emotions.

I don’t disagree— the baroque era was a staggeringly rich era of music.

Would you put him in the top 10 composers for piano?

I would add though that distinctions can be drawn among the above. I’ve played music of S. Scheidt, Scheidemann, Tallis, and Gabrieli (both the elder and younger). Scheidt (both Samuel and Gottfried) and Scheidemann were Sweelinck’s students and the influence is clear in their music. I would estimate that Marulo and Bull probably are closest to Sweelinck in keyboard technique among Sweelinck’s contemporaries and earlier players, Bull being born in the same year, and Marulo being a generation ahead.

The two Sweelinck Toccatas with which I’m familiar (possibly the only two known, not sure, and I play the Dm one) are nice compositions. They hold together well as music for modern listeners, and the strong similarities in form, style and character of the Dm one with Pachelbel’s Em Toccata do not seem like a coincidence, but the Fantasies are where his influence was strongest. I think the Echo Fantasies and Fantasia Chromatica are no small part of the bridge between the Renaissance and Baroque eras, with their influence on fughal writing, and Sweelinck’s students carrying it forward to the north German school of organists culminating in Buxtehude and Bach.

But measuring Sweelinck as a keyboard virtuoso, we can note that people traveled from around Europe to Amsterdam to hear him play, and organists traveled to Amsterdam to study with him, both at a time when travel was difficult. Sweelinck actually does not make my list of favorite composers. I just think he deserves more than the half a dozen sentences scattered on as many different pages by D. J. Grout in his “A History of Western Music” mentioning him mostly in reference to other composers. I think the New Grove got it right by saying that Sweelinck’s students became the organists against whom other organists were measured.

The transition from the Baroque to the Ricoco and classical periods brought the end of the golden age of the organ, which dominated European music for 400 years. Modern listeners have shunned the pipe organ, and pianists generally play the music of Baroque composers with a significant body of work for harpsicord, eg Bach and Scarlatti. I thus think Pachelbel and Buxtehude and many other great composers are neglected today because most of their keyboard music has pedal parts, and probably also because publishing was difficult and expensive at the time. A vast amount of great music from as great a musical era as the Romantic era now is neglected. My interest in Sweelinck stems from his having produced two versions of many of his keyboard works— organ versions as well as harpsichord versions without pedal parts. (Some of that also is the work of modern editors). This makes the work playable on piano.