Here is a generously filled Liszt disc containing a striking and rarely played work, A la Chapelle Sixtine, as well as six Bach transcriptions that demonstrate the composer's ability to rethink music written for one instrument in terms of another and his willingness to undertake such work on behalf of other composers: he was, of course, the greatest transcriber of others' music since Bach himself. The Sistine Chapel piece was doubly inspired, for the composer not only heard there the Allegri Miserere and Mozart's sublime Ave verum corpus (both choral pieces), he was also moved by the Chapel itself and not least its great frescoed ceiling upon which Michelangelo spent four years of his life (1508-12) and suffered ''the agony and the ecstasy'' of creation. (The celebrated 'divine touch' to Adam is illustrated on the cover of the booklet.)
Leslie Howard rightly brings to the opening pages of the music a sense of the epic and colossal, so that when the Ave verum appears at 4'50'' (high up and in B major, a key Liszt sometimes linked to sacred things) the contrast is well pointed—and although there's a suspicion of the saccharine when he speeds up and smooths out Mozart's motet by legato fingerwork and the sustaining pedal, that is still all part of a legitimate nineteenth-century view. What of Allegri's Miserere? Well, the booklet essay by the pianist tells us that it provides the harmonic basis of the opening music, but it is not obvious and anyone listening for the famous high treble solo soaring above the proceedings will listen in vain.
Howard's playing of all the works is secure and positive without, in my view, achieving all the magic that a more imaginative control of tone and texture could bring to it, while the recording, although generally pleasing enough, would have been better still with even more space around the piano. I find Howard heavy at times, for example in the latter part of the A minor Fugue (admittedly, Liszt's writing is all too ponderous here) and in that in C minor. Yet the C major Prelude has a fine delicacy and the following Fugue is well pointed. This repertory is not widely available, and I will not begrudge a recommendation to this thirteenth issue in Leslie Howard's Liszt series.'