It’s difficult to escape the air of academicism surrounding this disc, which was programmed by the musicologist-conductor Michael Vitalino while researching Liszt’s work at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where Benjamin Brecher and Robert Koenig teach voice and piano respectively. The original Petrarch Sonnets are flanked by genuine rarities or rarely heard versions of comparatively familiar songs. Inevitably, the disc invites comparison with Hyperion’s ongoing Liszt edition, which it also pre-empts by including a number of previously unrecorded items.

As so often, one is faced by the complexity and variability of Liszt’s reworkings of his own material. His elegiac first attempt at ‘Vergiftet sind meine Lieder’ is so far removed in style from its better-known revisions as to constitute a separate work, though the first ‘Die Lorelei’ seems like a sketch for the great song it eventually became: the expanded French version from 1883, ‘La Loreley’, is also included. ‘Quand tu chantes bercée’, thought to be unfinished (it only came to light in 1972), is ‘completed’ on this occasion by the strophic addition of a further stanza from Victor Hugo’s poem.

Brecher’s experience in the bel canto repertory shows in clean lines and clear diction, and he compensates for some hardness of tone at the top with a finely shaded mezza voce when singing softly. He loses out in the Petrarch Sonnets, though, to Matthew Polenzani’s ease and rapture for Hyperion, while the first ‘Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher’ ideally needs a dramatic soprano: the big descending arpeggios at its close are a bit unwieldy here. Elsewhere, however, there is much to enjoy: ‘Quand tu chantes’ is particularly delicious. Koenig, meanwhile, doesn’t match Julius Drake in terms of sweep and subtlety, though his playing is nicely focused, lapidary and un-showy.