Liszt visits Leicester

'The performance of Liszt on the piano is truly astonishing. He attempts to win your attention by captivating passages or pretty melodies: he begins incoherently, without any apparent design, as if a child dashed its hands upon the keys. Presently, a degree of arrangement ensues, promising something like intelligent music, when, at once, he overpowers you, by a flash of the most exquisite and luminous tone… Like Beethoven, he describes the grand evolutions of nature by the power of sound. He can raise a storn about him, which he finds in the hurly-burly of the instrument, so frightful, that he is obscured and lost; but as it dies away, he reappears through a mist decked in the most radiant colours. The rapidity with which he showered down a succession of minor thirds, through all the semi-tones, from the top of the instrument to the bottom – resembled the fall of a cataract into an abyss – producing whirls of thunder, on the lowest depths of the scale. This stroke of sublimity was strikingly shown in the elevated aspect of his countenance'

- William Gardiner, Leicester Chronicle, September 12th 1840.