Chamayou (on a Steinway) offers a luminous, supple, poetic sensibility that you sense is uncannily close to how Liszt himself would have imagined and played these wondrous pieces. Chamayou's technique, while huge, is also brilliantly clear: his way with Book One's 'Orage' is a phenomenal combination of lucidity and raging Byronic power.

Far from being too much of a good thing, Chamayou’s survey underlines the depth and breadth of Liszt’s inspiration. If poetic imagination is the prime quality one looks for in a Liszt interpreter, Chamayou has it in spades...His shimmering “Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este” is the highlight of Book Three.

one to make even the finest Lisztians look to their laurels. Hear him in the three Petrarch Sonnets, where a soaring sense of ecstasy is complemented by balzing eruptions of passion, everything engulfed as it were in restless and romantic enquiry. His 'Dante' Sonata brims over with a virtuoso savagery that dazzles and astounds...Yet even more remarkable is Chamayou's profoundly expressive response to the third and final book.

Chamayou is clearly a superb Lisztian, and makes the sequence of 26 pieces equally compulsive and delectable to listen to. Everything should be singled out, but I loved, as ever, the wonderful free-floating inventions of the Petrarch Sonnets in the Italian second book; and who could resist Chamayou’s streamingly brilliant account of Les Jeux d’eau de la Villa d’Este, from Book 3?

He's a pianist of tremendous resources, both technical and musical, possessing all the equipment to cope with Liszt's most extreme demands without ever flaunting it. He shapes even the most massive climaxes (his dynamic range is vast) with fastidious care, and much more pungent characterisation than he showed in his disc of César Franck last year...It's all the work of a major Liszt intepreter.