Even today Liszt remains seriously underestimated as a song composer. Like his adored Schubert, simple lyrics of scant significance could evoke from Liszt inspired settings. A case in point is the poem ‘Nonnenwerth’ by Prince Felix von Lichnowsky, which occasioned an achingly poignant song that Liszt returned to over the course of four decades in no fewer than four settings for solo piano. These provide the framework of this 44th instalment of Naxos’s series of the complete piano works, devoted to a lovingly selected group of transcriptions beautifully played by the Canadian-born pianist Joel Hastings.

Standouts among these fine performances are Festetics’s ‘Spanish Serenade’, reminiscent of Liszt’s more extended setting of Hugo’s ‘Gastibelza’, a dreamy account of Chopin’s ‘Mes joies’ and ‘The Blind Singer’, a vividly persuasive reading of Liszt’s melodrama to a text of Alexey Tolstoy. Two versions of the Romance oubliée hint at the evolving refinement and delicacy clearly discernible in the ‘Nonnenwerth’ settings. In all the performances Hastings employs great variety of touch without over-playing, a sure sense of pacing and, most critically for this repertory, acute sensitivity to the original texts.

These performances were expertly recorded at St Peter’s Church in Tallahassee, Florida, in January 2016 and, from a technical standpoint, are among the best in the Naxos series. The following May, Hastings, who served on the faculty of Florida State University, was felled by a fatal heart attack at the age of 46.