Leslie Howard, Wigmore Hall, London, review: No other pianist could have carried this off with such nonchalant efficiency

The Australian pianist celebrates his 70th birthday playing a series of masterly compositions

Howard’s energy is mind-boggling, and his forensic zeal exhaustible

If anyone can claim to be Liszt’s prime representative on Earth, it’s the Australian pianist Leslie Howard, who first came to prominence with his 99-CD box of Liszt recordings for Hyperion 20 years ago. For what most interested him was not the final versions of the best-known pieces, but all the versions which preceded them, and the way the great composer-pianist’s mind worked.

I once got him to play me the five drafts of a song about some cloisters on the Rhine, and was fascinated by the way the core remained the same while the cladding changed dramatically, unfurling like a flower and mutating all the time.

Howard’s energy is mind-boggling, and his forensic zeal exhaustible: in the American Library of Congress he found one of Liszt’s correction sheets with a missing item which he later found on the pasted-over reverse of a separate sheet, on which Liszt had written a different piece. “He probably decided against publishing this version,” said Howard, “but it’s too beautiful to neglect.”

At the Wigmore, he was celebrating his 70th birthday – and the release of his hundredth Liszt CD – with a programme entitled “Liszt at the Opera”: six dramatic arrangements of scenes and arias from works by Handel, Verdi, Mozart, Meyerbeer, Gounod, and Bellini.

They were all masterly compositions, and – with mountains of notes – they all demanded high-octane virtuosity. No other pianist could have carried off this programme with such nonchalant efficiency: Howard really is one of a kind.