Liszt, the virtuoso, played all the keyboard literature and travelled the roads and seas; Liszt, the thinker, nourished his intellect through his readings of Lamennais, Lamartine and Hugo, Shakespeare and Byron, Dante and Petrarch, Goethe and Schiller; Liszt, the composer of songs, indebted to Italian bel canto, the French romance and the German chorale, set texts written in six languages, not including Latin.

Hesitating between pure creation and transcription, which called upon his gifts as a wizard of the keyboard throughout his lifetime, he thus paid tribute to every facet of Western art, as may be seen from this recital, or "soliloquy", to use his own expression.

Tristan Pfaff, born 1985, studies with Michel Beroff and has been doing the rounds of the International Piano Competitions, winning the Arcachon. He came third in the recent Scottish International [Oxana Shevchenko was the winner].