Compared to the full-bodied sound of Lisitsa’s Liszt recital (reviewed above), Garrick Ohlsson’s is ‘cabined, cribbed, confined’ – not unappealing but a little too intimate for the bigger works to be heard at their best. There is, for example, no hint of the origins of the Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, the Fugue tripping merrily along as though it were the final movement from one of Bach’s English Suites. In what the booklet calls ‘Les jeux d’eaux á [sic] la Villa d’Este’, the small acoustic leaves little room for the piano to truly sing, and with Ohlsson making spare use of the pedal, there are long passages when this tone-poem sounds more like a staccato étude.

Given this, it’s all the more to Ohlsson’s credit that he can produce such a rich palette of colours, illuminating the texts throughout with exemplary clarity and surges of great power. To my mind, the second half of the disc is immeasurably better, despite this formidable artist’s questionable decision to give Liszt’s accompanying figures and the main melody equal prominence (try the opening pages of ‘Bénédiction’ and ‘Funérailles’ from about 6’11”). Liszt deconstructed – but also Liszt the versatile and many-faceted. Here is the questioning, enigmatic Nuages gris and the rarely recorded second of the Vier kleine Klavierstücke (another late work) artfully placed before the concluding fireworks of the First Mephisto Waltz. I have always been an admirer of Ohlsson but I can’t say that, good as it is, this disc is a must-have Liszt recital.