Re the two comments above me, I disagree, but I can sympathize with both. Liszt is a somewhat controversial orchestrator. Posterity has deemed him to be not the most colourful orchestrator in the world, and his orchestration isn't going to win universal admiration like Wagner's or Berlioz.' Michael Saffle said it best about his orchestration. To paraphrase: he wasn't a notable orchestrator of novelty (with some exceptions) or complexity, but what he was, was an orchestrator of great transparency. He almost never created muddy sounding or poorly balanced passages like Schumann or even Brahms sometimes did, unless it was for programmatic purposes. He later goes on to say that in his orchestration, Liszt "erected a skeletal tradition upon which later Romantic masters like Richard Strauss heaped mounds of sonic flesh."
Some people won't take to this kind of orchestration, but i've found the more i've gotten used to his orchestration the more beautiful i've found it. It's all very clear, very chamber like at times, and the way he delicately entwines the different instruments (like in the tone poem
Orpheus, the second movement of the
Faust Symphony, the lovely
shepards song in his oratorio
Christus or the Francesca da Rimini episode in his
Dante Symphony) is masterful.
But i've found that when it was required he could also be startingly appropriate, colourful, and certainly very innovative for his time. Here are some examples:
First of all, his first tone poem,
Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne begins with a muffled bass drum roll that was truly novel effect that was very radical for the time. It might seem somewhat commonplace now, but it was new back then and was appropriate for depicting what Liszt intended. The whole work was quite novel in its use of instruments, actually.
Or the colourful and evocative orchestration in
Der Nächtliche Zug
Hungaria, with its delightful percussion effects. Also, the 'whip cracking' sound effects that he also used in Mazeppa were used almost 20 years later by Tchaikovsky in Francesca da Rimini. I think this was a new effect, correct me if i'm wrong, and I don't know Wagner's music well enough to know if he used it before Tchaikovsky did.
And, of course, done well certain parts in the
Dante Symphony show remarkably novel orchestration - consider the wind effects right at the start (and occuring frequently throughout the movement) which can sound startling and frightening even today. (Unfortunately the recording i'm about to put down, that is otherwise good, is almost unbearably vulgar in its use of cymbals in the opening movement).
And also his tremendously vivid depiction of Jesus calming the waves in
Christus (at 24:34).
Overall, I find that Liszt was not only a very important orchestrator, but also a good one - even though he was inconsistent at times and not a great one like Berlioz. It also, to me, often depends on the performance. Sometimes he has sounded dull to me also, sometimes vulgar, but then I hear another performance of the same work and I think he's a master orchestrator.