Following his masterly disc of the Chopin Ballades (Fondamenta, 4/12), Jean Muller continues with Liszt’s 12 Etudes d’exécution transcendante. And here once more his daunting technique and musicianship combine to give us one of the very finest recordings of what for many is the ne plus ultra of Romantic rhetoric and grandiloquence. Not that Muller makes light of his Herculean task, telling us in his notes that ‘Feux follets’ (No 5) is ‘perhaps the most difficult work ever written for the piano…requiring the pianist to do the impossible’. Yet his command of this formidably inclusive lexicon of technique (lyricism as well as bravura) is unfaltering. His massive tonal weight in ‘Mazeppa’ (No 4) or ‘Vision’ (No 6) is quite without, say, Cziffra’s wilful distortions and his opulent quasi-orchestral grandeur is never compromised by superficial virtuosity.

There is more on Lazar Berman’s legendary recording, though Muller’s distinctive voice shines through all his performances. His ‘Feux follets’ is a wonder of scintillating double-note tracery and his way with the concluding ‘Chasse-neige’ is of an eerie power and desolation. Here is a true elemental rage that ‘For the listener, who listens in the snow / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is’ (Wallace Stevens).

As a curtain-raiser Muller adds the First Mephisto Waltz, its diablerie enhanced via the Busoni-Horowitz arrangement. Muscles bulge and ripple (has Rafael Nadal taken to the keyboard?) with everything vividly and formidably characterised. Entitled ‘Transcendence’, this disc captures Muller’s immense dynamic range, while on the front cover he is Mephistopheles himself.