Listening to Saskia Giorgini’s fifth release on Pentatone, it’s easy to see how her career has inspired such enthusiasm. She is an artist who meets Liszt on his own terms, sincerely, sympathetically and with a secure grasp of 19th-century Romanticism’s richly varied topography.

She plunges into the first Caprice-valse (‘Valse de bravoure’) with a joyous abandon that would be reckless were it not for the technical wherewithal that accommodates its mercurial rubato. The sadness encroaching on the Caprice-valse subtitled ‘Valse mélancolique’ speaks with a delicate ambivalence, poised yet unmistakably wistful. Her approach to the third, based on themes from Donizetti’s Lucia and Parisina, is that of the conjuror summoning recollections of both operas, replete with the spectacle of dazzling costumes and flickering footlights. Here, Giorgini’s unerring integration of fioritura passages is vividly evident.

Listening to the three Liebesträume is tantamount to hearing the poems of Uhland and Freiligrath declaimed by a great actor, provided one were privileged to hear the likes of a Talma or a Bernhardt. Not only are melodic lines clearly foregrounded, as required of songs transcribed for the piano, but their contours and emphases conform to the inflections of the original German texts.

With the subtle shadings of the first of the two Legends, ‘St Francis’s Sermon to the Birds’, we are introduced to Liszt the proto-Impressionist. Giorgini’s understated reading of ‘St Francis de Paul Walking on the Waves’ readily evokes the grandeur of ‘Tu es Petrus’ and the Entry into Jerusalem from Christus.

Finally, however, it may be the six Consolations that reveal the greater secrets. Extraordinary voicing in the first seems the equivalent of an expert choral ensemble. Out of the exquisite textures of the second, in E major, a miniature drama unfolds. The most popular of the set, the Lento placido in D flat, floats with ethereal calm, the melody held aloft by whispering undulations. Throughout the series, Giorgini shows her mastery of Liszt’s characteristic rhetoric. And no less rhetorically adept is the Valse-impromptu, tossed off with a spontaneous ebullience that almost conceals its technical brilliance.