It is nearly 20 years since Arnaldo Cohen inaugurated Naxos’s series of all Liszt’s solo piano music (6/97). Leslie Howard, in his record-breaking survey, took a mere 12 years to complete his (99 CDs for Hyperion, including 300 world premieres). I am not the only one to have rather lost track of what has appeared on Naxos and what has not.

Such lack of momentum and the label’s self-effacing promotion of the project should not deter you from investigating this latest instalment. Han Chen, if you have not come across him before, was the winner of the Sixth China International Piano Competition. This is his debut for Naxos. Despite his youth and relative inexperience, he fully merits his place in the series as a mature Liszt player par excellence and an artist to be reckoned with. All seven transcriptions are unforgiving in their technical demands, requiring strength, stamina and lightning reflexes, and while the law of diminishing returns can operate when listening to an hour-long sequence of such bravura works, Han Chen’s varied touch and tone makes it a journey one is eager to take without a break, though not without making you wonder afresh how on earth Liszt found the time to simply notate the music, never mind actually composing it.

Perhaps the two most notable performances here are the fantasies on themes from La Sonnambula (which Han Chen builds to a stunning conclusion) and Der Freischütz. The latter was given its premiere recording by Howard in 1999 when the score was still unpublished, a superb work despite the somewhat contrived thematic combination towards the end. Han Chen gives a more muscular and, frankly, even more thrilling performance than Howard, and is recorded in a more focused acoustic. But whether it be hyphenated Weber, Bellini, Erkel or Ernst II von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Prince Albert’s elder brother), Han Chen is impressively commanding and authoritative. What’s more, he seems to be thoroughly enjoying himself.