Can an Italian pianist fittingly celebrate the greatest Italian composer of the nineteenth century who did not compose any really significant piano pieces, because his universally acknowledged greatness was concentrated in the area of the opera? He can, provided his celebration takes place in an indirect manner, through the medium of a cosmopolitan composer who paid homage to his great contemporaries all over Europe.

The way in which Liszt observed the art of Giuseppe Verdi is quite significant, particularly if we consider what he chose, among the countless facets of Verdi’s musical and theatrical world, in order to produce the wonderful fantasies and transcriptions for piano that are contained in this disc. Here we do not find any trace of the 'moral' Verdi, or even less of the 'patriotic' Verdi, but we do find inexhaustible variations on the deep-rooted theme of Romanticism.