Liszt: The complete music for solo piano, Vol. 47 - Litanies de Marie

This forty-seventh volume in the series presents the early versions of pieces from the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. The history of this work is fully detailed in the accompanying booklet and is complex, Leslie Howard having painstakingly restored order to various manuscript sources and sketches. Extraordinarily, the 1847 set of the Harmonies turns out to be a rather more coherent work than the final, better known version. Yet is has never before been properly edited. These performances are therefore genuinely significant: none of this music has been recorded before, and it is unlikely that any will have been performed at all since Liszt's own time.

All of the music on this album is also available as part of the specially priced box set Liszt: Complete Piano Music: 'Almost any way you choose to look at it, this is a staggering achievement … the grand scope of this project gives us the chance, as listeners, to experience the almost incomprehensible breadth and depth of Liszt's imagination' (International Record Review).

CDA67187  71 minutes 29 seconds
‘Howard is a match for all that Liszt throws at his performers’ (Gramophone)
‘This is surely one of the most valuable of Leslie Howard's pioneering series, and all Lisztians should have it’ (The Penguin Guide to Compact Discs)
‘What Lisztian, indeed what pianophile, could resist this?’ (Classic CD)