Ferruccio Busoni composed a significant number of works for two pianos throughout his life. While Bach’s pervasive influence is already evident in some of his early compositions including the Preludio e Fuga and Capriccio, it reaches its most complex and glorious expression in the definitive 1921 version of his Fantasia contrappuntistica. In the case of Schumann’s Op. 134 for piano and orchestra, Busoni simply reduced the orchestral part for a second piano. However, his skill as a master transcriber and composer is revealed in his brilliant arrangements of Mozart’s works, which also highlight the subtlety and originality of his style. Aldo Orvieto has recorded extensively, releasing more than 70 albums dedicated to composers of the 20th century on a wide variety of labels, many receiving critical acclaim. Aldo Ciccolini appeared on the Naxos release of Achille Longo’s PianoQuintet (Ciccolini’s teacher) with the Circolo Artistico Ensemble (8.572628), which was nominated for an International Classical Music Award (ICMA).Classical Lost and Found wrote that: ‘Considering Ciccolini’s intimate association with his mentor’s quintet, this would have to be considered a definitive performance.’ Marco Rapetti received his Diploma cum laude at the Accademia Perosi in Biella. Rapetti has been awarded many prizes in national and international competitions, and has released several recordings, including the complete piano works of Borodin, Liadov, Dukas and Debussy.

Dance is the new album from pianist Stephen Beus. “Mesmerizing… explosive… intelligent… he belongs on the world stage” (Salt Lake Tribune). In the space of four months, American pianist Stephen Beus won first prize in the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, first place in the Vendome Prize International Competition (Lisbon) and he was awarded the Max I. Allen Fellowship of the American Pianists Association (Indianapolis). As a result of winning the Juilliard School Concerto Competition Mr. Beus made his Carnegie Hall debut with the Juilliard Orchestra and James DePreist, playing Prokofiev Concerto No. 3. He has also performed as guest soloist with the Gulbenkian Symphony (Lisbon), Oxford Philomusica, the Tivoli Symphony (Copenhagen), the Tbilisi National Opera Orchestra, the Northwest Sinfonietta (Seattle), the Royal Philharmonic of Morocco (Casablanca), the Vaasa Symphony Orchestra (Finland) as well as with the Hamburg, Indianapolis, Nashville, Santa Fe, Utah, Fort Worth, Tucson, Yakima, Bellevue, Salt Lake, Eastern Sierra, Corvallis, Jacksonville, Texarkana and Walla Walla Symphonies.

All the works on this recording were composed when Busoni was between the ages of eleven and fifteen. Full of charm and wit, they reveal his precocious absorption of earlier models- principally Bach, Mozart, Weber and Schumann- as well as exceptional technical finesse. Una festa di villagigio charts the day’s events of a village festival whilst Suite campestre, one of his most distinctive early compositions, possesses moments of inwardness that presage the mature works to come. Wolf Harden, who was born in Hamburg in 1962, is one of the most versatile pianists of his generation. He has enjoyed great success in the Trio Fontenay, an ensemble that he founded in 1980 and with which he has toured to all the world’s major music centres. Harden devotes himself not only to chamber music but, with the same success, to the solo piano repertoire. His concert tours have taken him to South America and India as well as to countries throughout Europe, and his special affinity with unusual repertoire is attested by numerous recordings. He was the first to record a complete version of Hans Pfitzner’s Piano Concerto and has recorded piano music by Erno Dohnanyi, Franz Lehar and Ferruccio Busoni.

On Nostalghia, his second PENTATONE album, pianist Francesco Piemontesi presents original works of Bach, alongside Bach transcriptions and works inspired by Bach from Ferruccio Busoni, Wilhelm Kempff and Maximilian Schnaus. Whereas many modern-day musicians aim to revive the instruments used in Bach’s own time, Piemontesi explores the tradition of Bach transcriptions for piano. This tradition started in the nineteenth-century, found its most prominent exponent in Busoni, and is still alive today, as Schnaus’s transcription of Kommst du nun, Jesu, vom Himmel herunter demonstrates. Despite using an instrument not yet existing in the composer’s time, Busoni and others sought to interpret Bach’s music with utmost reverence and study, expanding our notions of authenticity and Werktreue. For Piemontesi, playing Bach through the eyes of Busoni, Kempff and Schnaus incites a sense of nostalgia, re-establishing the ties to a rich pianistic tradition. The album title refers to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, a 1983 film about nostalgia and the untranslatability of art and culture. Francesco Piemontesi is among the most-cherished pianists of our age, and presents the second fruit of his exclusive collaboration with PENTATONE, having released the acclaimed Schubert - Last Piano Sonatas in 2019.

James Rhodes has no formal academic musical education or dedicated mentoring. The title of the debut album “Razor Blades Little Pills and Big Pianos”, hints at the suffering that dogged Rhodes’s childhood and early adult life. Classical music became his solace and key to his survival. It was Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, not Faith Hope and Charity, that offered comfort. In 1993, mental health issues stopped him taking up a scholarship to the Guildhall. Suffering further setbacks due to health issues it was not until 2008, when Rhodes met his present manager, Denis Blais, that he was encouraged to record his first album. This enabled him to bare his soul and put many of the ghosts of the past to rest. With Blais, Rhodes also created a distinctive and unique approach to how the classical piano repertoire should be presented. Uncomfortable with the austere and traditional ‘white tie and tails’ recital they decided it was time for the performer to communicate directly with the audience. Rhodes was going to introduce his own programme notes and share what it takes to perform these works of art using fascinating anecdotes about the composers and his own life experience. Delivered in his unique trademark stand-up style he creates an immersive experience that has won him and classical music a dedicated new following. His new album, presented here, shows the same no-holds-barred approach to these time-honored classics.

Peter Donohoe CBE studied at Chetham’s School of Music and Leeds University before going on to study at the Royal Northern College of Music with Derek Wyndham and in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod. He is acclaimed as one of the foremost pianists of our time, for his musicianship, stylistic versatility, and commanding technique. He first came across the works of Busoni in the early 1980s and, as he states in his booklet note, ‘Busoni’s contribution to the musical history of the twentieth century is inestimable, and I feel very much enriched by the several decades of my exposure to it.’ The program he has chosen includes three of the pinnacles of Busoni’s virtuosic output: the Toccata, BV 287, the seven Elegien, and the Sonatina on Bizet’s Carmen, alongside the much earlier Bach transcription of which Peter Donohoe writes: ‘The Toccata, in particular, has always struck me as one of the most joyous pieces in the history of instrumental music, and Busoni’s transcription certainly brings out that joy.’

Busoni never came closer to his dream of Italian music than with that night on May 11, 1917 of double performance in Zurich, which he calls himself "La Nuova Commedia dell' Arte" I ("Turandot") and II ("Arlecchino"). In the unusually short time from December 1916 to March 1917 Busoni reworked the already existing material to the Incidental Music of Gozzis "Turandot" into an opera. This happened 4 years before Puccini started to work on the same content. "Arleccino", though in immediate neighborhood to "Dr. Faust" looking almost like a secondary work, is perhaps the composer's actual key composition. The speaking hero of his "theatralische Capriccio" represents a role model, which is at times more important to him than his aesthetic Faust, especially as the World War was increasing in intensity.

REVIEW:

Gerd Albrecht (so persuasive in unusual repertoire) conducts a spirited account of Turandot, attentive to both its smaller detail and its more majestic moments, and the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra respond with some stunningly inspired playing. Coupled with some excellent contributions from RIAS Chamber Choir and a vivid, suitably atmospheric recording.

Josef Protschka is a particularly fine and formidable Kalaf, and a superb trio of performances from Robert Worle Johannes Werner Prein and Gotthold Schwarz as Truffaldino, Pantalone and Tartaglia (the equivalent of Puccini's Ping, Pang and Pong).

Albrecht's reading of Arlecchino is equally authoritative.

– Gramophone

Following his critically acclaimed debut Liszt Transfigured: Operatic Fantasies for Piano, which won the 40th Liszt Ferenc International Grand Prix du Disque in 2018, Chiyan Wong returns to record his second album for Linn. Alongside the piano music of Liszt, the music of Ferruccio Busoni has been a guiding light for the young, eclectic pianist. Here Chiyan combines Busoni’s kaleidoscopic arrangement of Bach’s famous Goldberg Variations, which celebrates the powerful sonority and range of the modern concert grand, with Bach’s timeless original. Chiyan’s ‘dazzling technical finish’ (Gramophone) and luxuriant sound are on full display in Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s famous Chaconne, a classic in the genre. Inversion, mirroring and variations are also idiomatic devices in Busoni’s Sonatina ‘in diem Nativitatis Christi MCMXVII and Chiyan’s own ‘composition etude’, Inversion of Variation 15 (Canone alla quinta), which complete this one-of-a-kind programme.

This new, exciting release will allow listeners to rediscover a great and too often forgotten pianist- Pietro Scarpini. “This set will appeal especially to aficionado’s of great pianism and will be of added value in enhancing Scarpini’s scant discography. The albums are complemented with a beautifully illustrated booklet. Rhine Classics have carefully restored and remastered these valuable aural documents in 24bit 96KHz sound.” (MusicWeb UK) “Piano-wise Rhine Classics has given us a stimulating six-album set of Pietro Scarpini playing Busoni and Liszt [...] all played with intelligence and the odd tell-tale flashback to old-world performing gestures.” (Gramophone UK)

Ferruccio Busoni was undoubtedly what can be termed a ‘child prodigy’. His maturity as a young pianist can only be indirectly evidenced by contemporary reports. But in his early compositions, his astonishing command of the meter can be assessed directly. In particular, he demonstrated a sure instinct for part writing and counterpoint, before he had received systematic teaching in these disciplines. Busoni connoisseurs will detect unexpected parallels to the works of his mature period; their germ cells, as it were. And the common music lover may find joy in a wealth of piano pieces, some of which at least need not shy any comparison with Schumann, Mendelssohn, Reinecke and Grieg.

“For a long time no child prodigy has appealed to us so sympathetically as the little Ferruccio Busoni. Precisely because he has so little of the child prodigy about him, but instead a lot of the good musician, both as a pianist and as a budding composer.” This is what Eduard Hanslick, the famous Vienna music critic, had to say in 1876 about the ten-year-old Ferruccio Busoni. Around this time Busoni had already composed many works – mostly for clarinet with other instruments, and all these works were very much born of the spirit of his father, who played the clarinet. In his time Ferdinando Busoni was a famous virtuoso and created a sensation as a traveling artist with opera fantasies and virtuoso showpieces.

Of his son’s two Violin Sonatas composed in 1889 and 1898, the op. 36a second sonata is to be regarded as an absolute key work. According to Busoni’s own testimony, it first delineated his unique character as a composer. The entire work is based on a Bach chorale, and it culminates in a magnificent variation movement on the same. However, his enormous public appeal and the admiration for his transcription technique made Busoni skeptical, and he thought that he had strayed onto conventional paths – which was not the case. The op. 29 first sonata is very much more conventional. Within its limits, very much in keeping with its composer’s life and times, the work today speaks unusually clearly to us, as an homage to Brahms, who supported Busoni, or as a link to the great pianist of those times, Anton Rubinstein, who himself published three violin sonatas.

“One of the most important advantages that the Luxembourg citizen has when abroad is that linguistically and culturally we embrace both the German and the French cultures...This gives a Luxemburger, particularly one active in the arts or the cultural environment, a different outlook and approach,” suggested Luxembourg composer Alexander Müllenbach in an interview. Perhaps it is this different perspective, the quite individual, open approach, that Françoise Groben herself had, a quality that she brought to her performance of German and French compositions for the cello. And it is for that reason that Banque Générale de Luxembourg placed at her disposal an exquisite instrument built by Matteo Goffriller in 1695.

Françoise Groben was born in Luxembourg on December 4, 1965. She received her first lessons in the cello at the age of five at the city’s Conservatoire, studying there with Francine Weber-Deprelle, Jean Join und Georges Mallach. She eventually completed her studies with Boris Pergamenschikov at the Cologne Musikhochschule, graduating in her concert examination, while continuing to attend master classes given by such artists as Daniil Shafran in Moscow or William Pleeth in London, or by the Amadeus Quartet. From 1974 onwards she was a member of the ensemble Les Musiciens founded by her father, Joseph Groben, and was only 15 when she first played in the Youth Orchestra of the European Union, going on to perform under such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Herbert von Karajan and Georg Solti. The recordings collected here illustrate the entire spectrum of Françoise Groben’s artistic interests, demonstrating that she was not only a leading soloist but also a gifted and coveted chamber musician who regularly included pieces by Luxembourg composers in her programs and was strongly committed to contemporary female composers.