This invaluable disc crowns Leslie Howard’s Herculean Liszt cycle recorded on 95 CDs. These are all first recordings of versions and fragments, of ‘work in progress’, chippings from the master’s workshop, that at once suggest his fecund imagination and ceaselessly active mind. The Mazurek and Krakowiak remember Poland and the Princess Marie zu Sayn-Wittgenstein while the Zigeuner-Epos declare his love of all things Hungarian, recalling his earlier Magyar Dolak and looking ahead to his epic 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies.

But it is Liszt’s early versions of the Angelus, Sunt lacrymae rerum, Sursum corda and La lugubre gondola which offer the most powerful insights. Here, you are made aware of his sense of earth as a vale of tears inextricably combined with his own personal bitterness and desolation. Liszt’s contemplation of suicide during his later years was surely erased not so much by his religious beliefs as by his capacity to articulate and exorcise his despair as he looked back to what he increasingly saw as a false glamour, ‘an expense of spirit in a waste of shame’.

Less darkly, many of the resolutions in the Zigeuner-Epos are achieved via the most circuitous routes and the first Album Leaf manages, within its brief 51-second space, to suggest that ambivalence of mood and harmony central to Liszt at his most introspective. There is a curious prophecy of Alkan’s Les Diablotins, composed 13 years later, in the 11th of the Zigeuner-Epos, and always there is a sense of how Liszt’s experimentation could have taken off or branched out in so many different directions.

Liszt scholars will have a field day though Leslie Howard, in his accompanying essay, clarifies every possible entanglement and enigma. His performances, too, are exemplary with all the commitment you would expect from a Lisztian of such tireless industry. He shows a special delicacy and vitality in the ‘friska’ (‘fast’) section of the Zigeuner-Epos No 9 and also in the final three fleeting Album Leaves, gone almost before they have commenced. Hyperion’s sound is of demonstration quality.