The 26-year-old Naples-born pianist Pier Carmine Garzillo, who did advanced studies at the universities La Sapienza in Rome and Alfonso X in Madrid, now teaches in Livorno and Aversa. For his solo debut recording, he has chosen three challenging Liszt works.

The Grosses Konzertsolo, composed for an 1850 competition at the Paris Conservatoire and dedicated to Henselt, here achieves a symphonic breadth. This lends great clarity to allegro movements, but when uniformly applied throughout the piece, these majestic tempos grow static. In lyrical passages, one especially yearns for a more pliant sense of forward movement. Unfortunately, even maestoso sections can sound inflated to bursting point and rooted to the spot. The roaring basses of Garzillo’s Yamaha grand don’t help these earthbound gargantuan tendencies.

Garzillo brings a convincing tenderness and pellucid textures to the gentle ‘Gretchen’ movement of A Faust Symphony, which Liszt himself transcribed in 1874. In the end, however, a judiciously applied rubato would go a long way towards realising the full poignancy of this delicate work.

The standout of the release is the solo version of the Totentanz, which has become so fashionable in recent decades. Tempos are bracing, maintaining admirable clarity throughout despite their velocity. Apart from minor amplification of the closing measures to match the concerto version, Garzillo is rigorously adherent to the score. His tendency to accord each beat of the measure equal emphasis impedes the optimal shaping of phrases and forward momentum, particularly in the opening, the canon variation and the repeated-note fugue. On the other hand, nice dynamic contrasts between the variations are maintained with great skill, and any sense of the bang-fest this piece so easily becomes is scrupulously avoided.

For alternatives to the infrequently recorded Grosses Konzertsolo, one might pass the fevered reading of Misha Dačic´ (Piano Classics, 6/13), heading directly for the more poetic performance of Giuseppe Andaloro or the heroic account of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet. For Gretchen, István Lajkó’s compelling recording places it between Carl Tausig’s piano transcriptions of A Faust Symphony’s two outer movements. Finally, it may well be that, for the foreseeable future, Totentanz, in any version, belongs to Bertrand Chamayou – available to view on YouTube.