All of the music on this album is also available as part of the specially priced box set Liszt: Complete Piano Music: 'Almost any way you choose to look at it, this is a staggering achievement … the grand scope of this project gives us the chance, as listeners, to experience the almost incomprehensible breadth and depth of Liszt's imagination' (International Record Review).

Liszt's 'Weihnachtsbaum' ('Christmas tree') is a delight; a 12-movement suite of great charm written between 1874 and 1876 which wholly belies its composer's reputation for the spare, troubled and troubling works of the same period such as 'Unstern!' or 'La lugubre gondola'. It was dedicated to his granddaughter Daniela von Bülow, the eldest child of Liszt's daughter Cosima and the conductor Hans von Bülow, although Cosima had by this time divorced and remarried, becoming the second Mrs Wagner. Although a fine pianist in her own right, Daniela grew up to be a costume designer, producing designs for her step-father's Bayreuth Festival.

As is only to be expected, Liszt's reworking of traditional carols (which include 'In dulci jubilo' and 'Adeste fideles') is exquisite, highlights of a work which contemplates the Christmas story from several different vantage points. In his booklet note for this album, Leslie Howard observes that Liszt arranges the suite's 12 movements into three groups of four: traditional carol melodies, a child's view of Christmas, and the recollections and reflections of a grown-up. These last four pieces have few specifically Christmas connotations (the ageing Liszt looking back on a long and eventful life?), although the 'evening bells' of the ninth piece are enchanting. Leslie Howard also notes that the 'scherzoso' fifth movement is one of Liszt's 'very few' scherzos—few other pianists are as reliably qualified to make such a claim—with the teenage dedicatee having to negotiate some perilously difficult piano writing as the Christmas tree candles are lit.

Leslie Howard's recording forms part of his monumental (and Guinness world record-holding) survey of Liszt's complete piano music, but pianophiles will also be interested in another recording available to download from the Hyperion website, on the APR label. This is not only its first recording (from 1952 or thereabouts), it was also one of the very earliest recordings made by no less a pianist than the young Alfred Brendel, and the first of four LPs he made for the American label SPA Records.