With this richly comprehensive two-CD album Pascal Amoyel finds his truest métier, playing with an extraordinary richness and intensity of expression. By his own confession, this former student of György Cziffra is attracted to music of a spiritual and mystical nature and his way with the Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses subtly and boldly conveys, whether in austerity or elaboration, the full complexity of Liszt’s religious life, his alternative exultation and despair. How he warms to the colossal quasi-orchestral grandeur of “Invocations”, and any initial impression that he could achieve a greater sense of serenity and mounting ecstasy in the “Bénédiction” by simpler means is countered by an urgency and commitment that make other more fleet and elegant recordings sound superficial by comparison.

Again, in “Funérailles” Amoyel bypasses conventional wisdom, going his own way with the greatest imaginative resource, and few performances of this tragic masterpiece have achieved a greater impact. He is entirely at home in the “Andante lagrimoso” with its halting and painful prophecy of Fauré’s late manner, and in the central section of “Cantique d’amour”, where the melody is entangled in pulsing chordal figuration, he achieves a consummate balance between poise and passion.

In the three Liebesträume Amoyel makes it clear that for Liszt, secular and spiritual love were opposite sides of the same coin, while the Romance oubliée (prefaced most interestingly by an early, rudimentary version) is a bittersweet memory of past happiness. In extreme contrast, the Second Ballade is made to smoulder and blaze with an authentic Lisztian rhetoric, a final pointer to those doubting Thomases who still view Liszt’s bewildering, multi-faceted genius with suspicion. Finely recorded, this is an invaluable album