Here, like some valedictory blessing on the Liszt year, are tributes that would surely have brought tears of gratitude from the composer himself on hearing his genius so ardently celebrated and confirmed rather than ridiculed. Bertrand Chamayou, who gives us a complete Années de pèlerinage, is a young French pianist of an impeccable pedigree and one to make even the finest Lisztians look to their laurels. Hear him in the three Petrarch Sonnets, where a soaring sense of ecstasy is complemented by blazing eruptions of passion, everything engulfed as it were in restless and romantic enquiry. His ‘Dante’ Sonata brims over with a virtuoso savagery that dazzles and astounds (its whirling rhetoric emerging from a sulphurous pedal haze; a deeply imaginative touch) and yet even when muscles bulge and ripple with everything played to the hilt there is anadded moving and confiding repose in the central dolcissimo con amore. There arefurther wonders in Venezia e Napoli, that garland of encores, an elemental octave uproar in ‘Orage’ and a shimmering tonal magic in ‘Au bord d’une source’ (both from Book 1, Switzerland).

Yet even more remarkable is Chamayou’s profoundly expressive response to the third and final book (Italy), where he recreates Liszt’s retreat into a dark night of the soul, music where religious solace is clouded and thwarted by doubt, anguish and bursts offist-shaking despair. Such music faithfully mirrors Liszt’s often desperate psychological state during his last years when, like Gerard Manley Hopkins, he woke ‘to feel the fell of dark, not day’.

Then there is Oliver Schnyder, scarcely less distinguished in the Swiss année, coupled most strikingly with the two St Francis Legends and the shuddering, fragmented poetry of the Malédiction for piano and orchestra, a true danse macabre. A pianist of massive technical resource, this 28-year-old German pianist captures all the Byronic gloom of ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ and evokes St Francis’s sermon to his flock with a poetic empathy that comes close to Wilhelm Kempff’s unearthly spiritual beauty in his early Decca recording. Both pianists are sumptuously presented and recorded.