The booklet is infuriating. The 12-page German/English text has an (admittedly interesting) essay on ‘Franz Liszt and the Organ Landscape of Central Germany’, a history of the organ (the 1998 Jehmlich in the church of St Wolfgang in Schneeberg) we are hearing and the organist’s biography. Of the music there is not a single word beyond the track-listing. This leaves much to be desired, leaving the novice as much in the dark as the aficionado. On disc 1 we have ‘Evocation’. Would this be Evocation à la Chapelle Sixtine (after Allegri and Mozart), S658? Ah, yes, it would. Disc 5 boasts ‘Kreuzandachten I-IV’ and ‘San Francesco’. A sentence would have told the buyer that these are, respectively, four arrangements of movements from Via Crucis and the Prelude to The Canticle of the Sun. But I’m not going to spend the rest of this review writing Querstand’s booklet for them.

As Leslie Howard’s monumental survey on Hyperion has shown, there are large swathes of Liszt’s piano works that remain undeservedly neglected. The same cannot be said of the complete organ works. Beyond the three indisputable masterpieces (the Prelude and Fugue on the Name B-A-C-H, the Fantasia and Fugue Ad nos, ad salutarem undam and the Variations on Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen) there is only a handful of works which aspire to be in the same class – all of them, except the brief curtain-raiser that is Excelsior!, transcriptions: Orpheus (Liszt’s orchestral tone-poem), Evocation, Trauerode, Angelus! Prière aux anges gardiens (identified here as Angelus) from Book 3 of Années de pèlerinage, and ‘Dante’ (from the Dante Symphony).

There are nearly 40 works here, lasting something over five hours. The completist/reference-library tag of the project lends to it a certain doggedness – great, good or mediocre, like it or not, all the music has got to be included – and to a certain extent this is reflected in the performances. István Ella is mercifully unflashy – he is clearly a musician of great integrity – but the playing is all rather dutiful and stolid. His registrations are conservative and unimaginative: in Ad nos, for example, the tromba entry in the first ‘movement’ is hardly distinct, the array of colours with which organists such as Simon Preston, Thomas Trotter and Xavier Darasse invest the central section is entirely absent and the sparkling allegro vivace section in the finale fails to ignite, a rare example, it must be said, of Ella’s crisp articulation deserting him. The two Bach-inspired works come off well, nicely paced in St Wolfgang’s pleasing acoustic, and ‘Dante’, Orpheus and ‘Evocation’ are among other highlights well worth hearing. So a bit of a curate’s egg and I’d much rather go with Peter King at Bath Abbey (three discs on Regent, 7/11) for the essential rather than the complete Liszt.