Following his superlative Hyperion recording of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (10/02), Steven Osborne continues with Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, music which, whether desolating or conciliatory, is surely a true precursor of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Attuned to the mystic heart at the centre of Liszt’s Catholicism, Osborne once more shows himself blessed with the sort of stylistic ease and tonal magic that come to very few young pianists. Here, sacred and profane love blend with a wholly Lisztian alchemy and a fruitful and enriching ambiguity, the one inextricably bound up with the other.

In ‘Invocation’, that magnificent gateway to the cycle, Osborne offers up its quasi-orchestral rhetoric with immense power yet without a hint of bombast. How daringly understated is his ‘Bénédiction’, where he casts a light of rare grace and refinement on pages which in less distinguished hands can all too easily topple into lavish, tear-laden emotionalism (even the critic who recently wrote that the ‘Benédiction’, surely among Liszt’s greatest utterances, amounts to little more than an elaborate version of Rustle of Spring, might think differently if he heard a performance of such calibre).

‘Pensées des morts’ is another triumph of alternating anguish and exultance, and if all conventional pomp and circumstance are erased by Osborne’s brisk tempo in the opening of ‘Funérailles’, his performance is still a marvel of concentrated musicianship and individuality. In the Andante lagrimoso he conjures an uncanny stillness in music whose painful climbing looks ahead to the dark, attenuated utterances of Fauré’s final years (the Seventh Barcarolle and Third Prelude) while the final ‘Cantique d’Amour’ resolves all past torment in a paean of praise for the union of two traditionally opposed ideas of love. Few more radiant or deeply considered Liszt recordings have ever been made. The more ‘interior’ Liszt (the Legends, the Christmas Tree Suite and so on) cry out for such a pianist, particularly when presented in Hyperion’s immaculate sound.