Today, when Schubert’s canonic status in Western music has been long established, it is easily forgotten that his true measure as a creative force emerged only gradually during the 19th century, as more and more of his music became known after his death in 1828. When the Unfinished Symphony was premiered in Vienna in 1865, 40 years after its composition, the critic Eduard Hanslick wrote that it was ‘as though, after a long separation, the composer himself were among us in person’.

Liszt was key to the growing awareness of Schubert’s immense contribution. During the 1830s and ’40s he transcribed some 58 of Schubert’s songs for solo piano and, in 1851, arranged the Wanderer Fantasy as a piano concerto. He conducted the premiere of Schubert’s unpublished opera Alfonso und Estrella in Weimar in June 1854, and in the early 1870s undertook an edition of Schubert’s piano music for the Stuttgart publisher Cotta. Liszt’s set of nine ‘valse-caprices’ based on Schubert dances called Soirées de Vienne was written in 1852 and published the following year. The Sixth Soirée became so immensely popular that, by the beginning of the 20th century, it seemed one could hear it on every other piano recital.

Alberto Ferro, who at 25 is a professor at the Umberto Giordano Conservatory in Foggia, now joins the relatively few pianists to have recorded the complete set of Soirées. His success with these pieces is in the straightforward simplicity of his approach, echoing Liszt’s own largely non-interventionist handling of Schubert’s unpretentious originals. The Fourth, for instance, to which Liszt attaches a prelude resembling the opening of Beethoven’s E flat Sonata, Op 31 No 3, is all delicate intimacy before evolving into stylish brilliance. A sweet, folkish diffidence is evoked in the Fifth, conjuring shy peasant girls dancing for guests visiting from the capital. Though understated throughout, the Third Soirée is charming and effective. The more extrovert of the set, Nos 6, 7 and 8, seem as appropriate as the accompaniment for a happy evening among friends as they might on a recital before a discriminating audience.

Ultimately, Ferro’s Viennese dances recall Busoni’s conviction that ‘the enthusiasm Liszt feels for Schubert, in the immediacy of discovery, floats above the spring of Schubert’s melody like a mist at dawn’.