A Faust Symphony; Dante Symphony; Les Preludes; Prometheus.

Liszt: A Faust Symphony; Dante Symphony; Les Preludes; Prometheus. Sir Georg Solti, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic; Jesus Lopez-Cobos, L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Decca Double 289 466 751-1 (2-disc set.)

This mid-priced Decca Double should be a bonanza for Liszt lovers. It combines two of the composer's largest and most ambitious orchestral works with a pair of his most popular tone poems and offers them in thrilling performances, especially the one from Georg Solti.

Liszt is credited with inventing the tone poem, and no matter what he calls his music it almost always comes out a tone poem. The two "symphonies" represented here, "Faust" and "Dante," are, in fact, each a series of tone poems. The "Faust," conducted by Solti with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and Siegfried Jerusalem, tenor, is big and bold. It is not so subtly impressionistic as Beecham's (EMI), but it catches the multi-layered drama of the protagonist, Dr. Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil; the passion and purity of his love interest, Gretchen; and the turbulence of the devil, Mephistopheles. The digital sound, from 1986, is the best of the lot, full and robust, not entirely well imaged in terms of depth but convincingly dynamic.

The "Dante" symphony is more problematic. It tries to create a musical picture of Dante's "Divine Comedy," representing the Inferno and Purgatory but without Paradise. Liszt was talked out of trying to do Paradise by no less an authority than Wagner. Too bad. It might have been fun to hear what the master tone painting could have done with it. Instead, Liszt ends "Purgatorio" with just a hint of things to come, a brief vision of heaven. Then, Decca provide us a loud, boisterous alternative ending that Liszt was persuaded to add later on. It's better not played. Lopez-Cobos leads a fairly routine performance of the work, which is not helped by the sometimes fierce 1981 early digital sound.

The two-disc set is filled out with two poems, the popular "Les Preludes" and "Prometheus." I suspect it's "Les Preludes" that is Liszt's best-known purely orchestral work, thanks in large measure to the old "Flash Gordon" serials of the thirties and forties, which borrowed from the score extensively. Solti's interpretation of it is possibly the best on the market in terms of sheer excitement. The sound of the two poems comes in analogue from 1977 and holds up well, although here the imaging tends to be compartmentalized to a greater degree than the others. Anyway, it's a thoroughly recommendable pair of discs.