In 2004 at the age of 11, British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor became the youngest ever winner of the keyboard section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition. His first album for Decca, Chopin Liszt Ravel, was released in 2011 to critical acclaim and rave reviews. It contained just one work by Liszt, the sublime nocturne En rêve (In a Dream), from 1885, but for his sixth Decca album, a decade on, Grosvenor has devoted an entire program to the 19th-century keyboard titan.

Benjamin Grosvenor

Its centrepiece is Liszt’s monumental B Minor Sonata (S178), which Clara Schumann declared to be “nothing but sheer racket” when Liszt dedicated it to her husband Robert in 1854. Notoriously technically demanding, structurally complex and symbolically elusive, this cornerstone of Romantic piano repertoire was written to be played attacca – with no pause between movements, such as they are discernible – as one long work of approximately half an hour.

This presents very particular demands of phrasing, pacing and dynamics for the pianist. Grosvenor, who has been playing this sonata since he was a teenager, notes that “it is a piece high on improvisation, its themes taking...