For his latest Avie release, British pianist Charles Owen has chosen the nine pieces comprising Liszt’s 1855 Swiss Année, delivering a performance imaginatively rich, drenched with colour and thoroughly original in concept.

In ‘Chapelle de Guillaume Tell’, features that will characterise the entire set announced themselves: full, organ-like sonorities, beautifully voiced; spacious tempos, suggesting bracing air and awesome vistas; and rhetorically apt melodic lines that soar effortlessly above even tumultuous accompaniments. As the suite progresses, extraordinary variety comes into focus. No piece resembles another. After the depiction of Tell’s Chapel on the banks of Lake Lucerne, the scene changes to a placid glacier lake in ‘Au lac de Wallenstadt’ and from there to the flower-dotted Alpine meadows of ‘Pastorale’. After the deft evocation of the play of light on gently bubbling water of ‘Au bord d’une source’, Owen summons a furious Alpine storm in ‘Orage’, with buffeting winds and blinding snow. It is lent shape and contour, however, by his assiduous observance of Liszt’s articulation, phrasing and dynamic indications. What so often seems a cacophonous blur awash with pedal is here a study in spellbinding aural imagery.

The longest piece and philosophical heart of the cycle is Liszt’s response to Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s 1804 epistolary novel Obermann. Owen’s approach to ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ strips away the hysteria and melodrama that occlude the piece’s substance in so many interpretations, revealing a forthright human utterance that moves plausibly from desolation and doubt to spiritual rejuvenation. The playful ‘Eglogue’ quickly dispels weighty matters in frolicsome though short-lived high spirits. Owen artfully negotiates the mercurial mood swings and pervasive ambivalence of ‘Le mal du pays’ so that, arriving at last at ‘Les cloches de Genève’, heard at night and from a distance, the relief is palpable. The authenticity of each piece, combined with the progressive emotional coherence of the cycle as a whole, gives Owen’s interpretation of this proto-Impressionist masterpiece its vivid immediacy.

The magnificent third piece of the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, ‘Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude’, rounds out the album with the voice of reverent repose implicit in its title. Sensitive to every turn of Liszt’s harmonic invention, Owen’s chords are so beautifully balanced they seem almost luminescent. Accomplished with thorough and refined pianistic skill and a wholehearted identification with Liszt’s message, Owen’s music-making is powerfully compelling.