There can be little doubt that Martin Haselböck hears his Liszt from the organ loft. His five-CD set of the organ works (NCA) attests to both musical perception and scholarship, and I’m fairly certain that his approach to the complete orchestral works, of which this is the first volume, will find him a thoughtful and imaginative proponent of Liszt’s revolutionary language. He locates quite a few similarities between Liszt’s orchestrations and the organ registrations that he indicated for the extant instruments by his own organ builder Ladegast. There’s a darkness of timbre common to both. The “period” element (using 19th-century instruments and authentic forces) is obvious right from the Dante Symphony’s dramatic “Inferno” opening, the brush of dark-grain string tone and the explosively crescendoing timpani and tam-tam.

For the insistent main body of the movement, Haselböck opts for a gruelling, steady pulse, though he’s more willing to bend the line than Gianandrea Noseda is on his leaner, more classically fashioned reading with the BBC Philharmonic. So often in this work, the brass dominate – as they mostly do on Hartmut Haenchen’s exciting 1995 “live” Netherlands Philharmonic recording, identically coupled. Under Haselböck brass and strings are better integrated and individual detail is more subtly illuminated. Note in particular the ethereal, harp-led arabesques at 7'18" (prophetic of both Sibelius and Rachmaninov), and the plaintive clarinet tone that takes over soon afterwards.

At 16'05", cavorting clarinets and stopped horns make a striking impression, and, when the big drums return a couple of minutes later, their effect is overwhelming. The aching modulations of “Purgatorio” are made all the more ghostly by a relative lack of vibrato from the strings (at 4'43", listen to how the clarinet underpins the texture, and to the solemnity of the fugue soon afterwards, so reminiscent of Berlioz’s much earlier Romeo et Juliette). Haenchen’s more conventionally expressive approach leaves a quite different impression, sweeter but less disquieting. Haselböck’s account of the “Magnificat” has a radiance about it that sets the scene for the astonishing second work on the disc, the haunting A la Chapelle Sixtine, a melding of Allegri’s Miserere and the late Ave verum corpus by Mozart, who many years earlier had committed Allegri’s work to memory. The orchestral version is among the most original and moving of Liszt’s compositions, and Haselböck offers a most beautiful performance of it.

An auspicious start, then, to what should prove an important new series, a valid overview and an interesting alternative to the more weighted, modern-instrument options provided by the likes of Masur, Haitink, Karajan and the unstintingly passionate Nikolai Golovanov – though none of the aforementioned offers as comprehensive an overview as that Haselböck is planning for us.