Unsettling meditations on the passing of life, Wagner and western tonality, the music of Liszt’s old age is like nothing else of its time. Cédric Tiberghien proves wholly attuned to its unconventional demands in a programme concluding with the third and last of the Années de pèlerinage.

If your idea of Liszt piano music is heady, over-the-top Romantic virtuosity, you’ll think again when you hear Cédric Tiberghien’s typically thoughtful, probing new disc for Hyperion. He couples the third of the Années de pélerinage collections (the latest and most introspective of the three) with a selection of the late piano pieces from the 1880s, all of which seem to look forward to the Angst-laden fin de siècle and beyond, to the world of early modernism. It’s a brilliantly conceived recital which successfully challenges the received view of Liszt as an archpriest of extrovert High Romanticism and instead presents him as one of the most visionary and prophetic composers of the mid- to late-19th century. And it succeeds largely because Tiberghien, one of today’s most intelligent and technically gifted pianists, combines dazzling keyboard prowess with a breadth of repertoire that ranges from the late Baroque to the modernist masterpieces of the late-20th century, along with an unfailing musical intelligence and integrity.

The disc’s first half is devoted to the late piano works, beginning with the startlingly forward-looking Bagatelle sans tonalité of 1883, originally conceived as one of the Mephisto Waltzes. Played as it is here on a superb Yamaha CFX grand piano, which under Tiberghien’s hands responds to the slightest nuance of mood and expression and offers a phenomenal range of colours, it’s more redolent at times (as are so many of these pieces) of Debussy and Ravel, though Liszt’s inimitable style is always there in the background. Tiberghien brings a wonderfully soft, gentle touch to the haunting Wiegenlied (‘Cradle song’) of 1881, and then a diabolic intensity and drive to the Mephisto Waltz no.4 of 1883, yet without losing that lightness of touch that maintains an airborne sense of momentum.

The desolation and mournful sadness of La lugubre gondola II (a premonition of Wagner’s death) has rarely sounded so poetic as it does here, in a remarkable performance that rises brilliantly to the challenges of late Liszt’s often quiet but nevertheless hugely demanding virtuosity. The nocturne Schlaflos! (‘Sleepless!’), with its question-and-answer structure seeming to look back to Beethoven’s op.135 String Quartet, was written in March 1883, soon after the death of Liszt’s son-in-law Wagner, Here it receives a wonderfully poised reading, as if held tenderly in mid-air. It’s a mood that spills over into the last of the late piano pieces presented here, En rêve (‘Dreaming’) of 1885, a Chopinesque gem whose inner stillness is unlike any other of these works.

In many respects the third set of the Années de pélerinage, composed between 1867 and 1877, a decade after the previous collection in the series, inhabits a world that looks forward to the late piano works. Introspection and a range of gentle colouring are prioritised over outward display, and again the world of the French Impressionists is never far away. This is most obvious in the fourth piece, Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este, which inspired a whole repertoire of subsequent ‘fountain’ piano works that evoke the ‘play of water’ with gently coruscating piano cascades. Here Tiberghien is at his dazzling best in a breathtaking reading that has the listener spellbound at the range of touch and colour as much as at the sheer dexterity of his playing. And these qualities are in evidence throughout this performance, from the opening Angelus! which rises to a magnificent climax before fading away, through the regret-tinged, often ominous evocations of the cypress trees at Rome’s Villa d’Este, the Hungarian-infused Sunt lacrymae rerum and the Funeral March (in memory of the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico), to the religious evocations of Sursum corda (‘Lift up your hearts’), which builds to a spectacularly rich peroration all the more surprising in the context of the disc as a whole.

Be in no doubt: this is an utterly superb recording from the questing first notes to the echoes of the last, executed with a pianism that will impress even seasoned Liszt aficionados. Yet it will also certainly convert newcomers with its constantly intelligent musicianship and kaleidoscopic, prophetic colours. Recording and presentation are all one has come to expect from Hyperion, and this is an utterly compelling disc, urgently recommended.