At least until Liszt’s bicentenary, complete recordings of his Harmonies poétiques et religieuses were something of a rarity. Even stalwart Lisztians such as Richter and Brendel contented themselves with excerpts. But since 2011 there have been several fine accounts, including those of Steven Osborne, François-Frédéric Guy and the late, sorely missed Brigitte Engerer. Now there is another, by the Cologne-born pianist currently based in Linz, Michael Korstick.

In Liszt’s engagement with the poetry of Alphonse de Lamartine, there is a naked intensity, an urgent, in-your-face, lapel-grasping earnestness that one doesn’t find, say, in the Années de pèlerinage. Therein lie the challenges of this 10-piece cycle lasting close to an hour and a half. Reticence and half measures will scuttle the entire enterprise, and few pianists are willing to lay it all out so boldly. Fortunately Korstick isn’t one of them.

From the outset, the high-flown rhetoric and dense textures of ‘Invocation’ are delivered with grace and conviction. The less elaborate pieces, the ‘Ave Maria’, ‘Pater noster’ and ‘Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil’, all derived from Liszt’s own choral settings, are models of simplicity and directness. The two highly personal pieces that conclude the cycle, ‘Andante lagrimoso’ and ‘Cantique d’amour’, for all their wealth of detail, are strikingly sincere.

But it is in the grandes machines, the three big extended works that form the backbone of the Harmonies, that Korstick is at his most impressive. ‘Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude’ is spacious, questing yet disarmingly intimate. ‘Pensée des morts’, the earliest of the set and, in many ways, the most harmonically and rhythmically daring, emerges with the naturalness of speech. The most familiar and abused of the set, ‘Funèrailles’, Liszt’s monument to the so-called Martyrs of Arad executed at the end of the Hungarian Revolution, profits most from being heard in context. In this mighty funeral march, Korstick evokes the great spectacles of public mourning that we know from 19th-century photographs and written accounts. After that, the rolling, organ-like textures of the ‘Miserere d’après Palestrina’ come as the inevitable and only possible answer.

For the unique admixture of mysticism, exultation, contemplation and protest that is the Harmonies, if Engerer remains my first choice, Korstick emerges a close and solid second.