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" ...