More than a decade after Leslie Howard seemingly put his comprehensive Liszt cycle to bed, so to speak, the indefatigable pianist/scholar has amassed nearly two and a half hours’ worth of previously unknown and/or inaccessible material that ranges from album-leaf scribblings to several substantial large-scale works.

The collection opens with a real find in the three-movement, 20-minute-long Romancero espagnol, dating from the late 1840s. Careful restoration from the manuscript yielded a performing version published by the Liszt Society Journal in 2009. The music is quite extrovert, dramatic and harmonically adventurous. Although the finale is based on the same Jota aragonesa familiar from Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody, it’s treated quite differently for the most part. Howard also presents a first version of the Scherzo und Marsch that’s a little more prolix and texturally unwieldy in comparison to the more compact and scintillating revision. The second movement of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy appears in a much earlier and more difficult transcription that Liszt would revise to superior pianistic effect years later. Conversely, Liszt returned to his definitive and quite faithful transcription of the March from Wagner’s Tannhäuser in order to add a few improvisational flourishes and alterations. Even the most fragmentary short works hold fascination, such as the Andantino in A flat, which is a wistful, introspective setting of Chopin’s Polish song “The Maiden’s Wish”, while, by contrast, an arresting, furious chromatic gesture initiates a fugue that breaks off after 18 seconds.

Clearly tackling Liszt anew in the studio has revitalised Howard’s pianism. Sample the thundering sonorities he summons from the piano’s bowels in the Magnificat, S182a, the relaxed ebb and flow he brings to the “simplified” Valse-Impromptu, or how even the most fragmentary works never fail to communicate shapely elegance (the 19-second Cadenza, S695f, for example). As always, Howard’s annotations reveal a high level of detective work, musical insight and scholarship without pedantry.