Georg Solti's brash and barnstorming approach works well with Liszt's sprawling Faust Symphony. The music's bombast readily absorbs the Chicago Symphony's blaring brass, here unleashed with precious little need to be concerned with good taste. That's not to say they make ugly sounds--far from it. Solti elicits a warm and glowing sonority from his orchestra, even if it is somewhat trombone-dominated. As an interpretation, Solti's is pretty straightforward, without the mercurial fantasy of Bernstein and Boston or the superheated passion of Muti and Philadadelphia (the best played version of all). While the Gretchen movement is too slow (but then, it always is, except with Masur on EMI), Solti exhibits a surprisingly light touch in the finale, where Siegfried Jerusalem and the men of the Chicago Symphony Chorus provide a satisfyingly beefy rendition of the closing pages.

Solti turns up the heat in his earlier London Philharmonic recordings of Liszt's potboiling tone poems. Les Préludes' forward thrust evokes vivid memories of the old Flash Gordon serials, while in Prometheus Solti's trombones make you startlingly aware of Liszt's "futuristic" harmonies. Turning to that even less-subtle opus, the Dante Symphony, we find Jesús López-Cobos inspiring the Suisse Romande Orchestra to a raw ferocity unknown in the days of Ernest Ansermet. But it's Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic who really whip up the hellfire in the Inferno movement (which features an exquisitely vulgar trombone figure that would make a great rock guitar riff). In the Purgatorio, López-Cobos' delicacy and poignancy bring on relief like a gentle summer rain before taking us heavenward, carried aloft by the women's choir--unless of course you opt for the included alternative ending, which blazes with fortissimo brass chords. (But why on earth would you do that?) The remastered sound on all three sessions is well balanced, with the Chicago recording now mostly free of its early digital glare.

--Victor Carr Jr