The music on this release belongs mainly to Ferruccio Busoni's youth and is certainly indebted to the great romantic appraoch to the piano of Chopin, Schumann and Mendelssohn, apart from the Contrapunctisches Tanzstuck of 1889 with its more futuristic broadening of the tonal palette. Later in his life Busoni leaned towards a young new classicism, generated by his instinctive identification with the great J.S. Bach.

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Once a towering inspirational figure in the musical life of Berlin, later a crucial influence on musicians as diverse as Sibelius, Varèse, Schoenberg and Weill, Ferruccio Busoni is now being rediscovered by a new generation of performers and listeners. Kurt Weill wrote: “Ferruccio Busoni has been called the last Renaissance man. It is strange enough that such a phenomenon appeared in our time. We are bound to think of Leonardo. In him also we find that comprehensive spirituality which strives to open up all attainable spheres. Such individuals are immortal not only through their work but through the radiation of their personality, through the gradual influence of their humanity.” Busoni’s sui generis five-movement Piano Concerto is a work that bears comparison to Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Mahler’s Eighth. This revelatory new recording by pianist Kirill Gerstein with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the men of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus conducted by Sakari Oramo is a landmark in the wider acclamation of a singular genius who mapped a sublime 20th century alternative to the modernist revolt of Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

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REVIEW:

The performance is so well thought-through and so expertly performed, as well as so perfectly recorded, that this must now surely qualify as one of the top choices for this work. Hopefully it will encourage many others to take the plunge and explore this multi-faceted behemoth. Like any cliff-face, it’s intimidating at first, but renders many rewards when you work at it, and in this company those rewards are all the richer. I’d be very surprised if this isn’t one of my discs of 2019.

– MusicWeb International (Simon Thompson)

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Busoni: Piano Works

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For his debut album, the Leipzig-based pianist Hannes Pohlit has recorded rare works of the virtuoso piano-repertoire on the Blthner grand piano. The recordings took place in 2021 in the Media Campus Villa Ida (Leipzig) and were sponsored by the Media Foundation of the Sparkasse Leipzig. Hans Werner Henze's (1926 2012) "Lucy Escott Variations", dedicated to the memory of a historical opera-singer, pay homage to the elegance of the Italian Belcanto. George Enescu's (1881 1955) first Piano Sonata explores the dark colors of Romanian soul-landscapes. Franz Liszt's (1811 1886) most famous organ work "Fantasy and Fugue on the choral 'Ad nos, ad salutarem undam'" was performed at the inauguration of the great organ in the Merseburg Cathedral. In the transcription for piano by Ferruccio Busoni (1866 1924), the pianist shows the great variations of timbres Blthner Aliquot grand piano can provide, from the highly expressive fantasy to the roaring fugue, and in the meditative Adagio gives space for the warm, vocal timbres of the instrument.

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The essence of Busoni's music lies in a synthesis of his Italian and German ancestry: emotion and intellect, imagination and discipline, often allied with a re-creative approach to the musical past.

Includes work(s) by Ferruccio Busoni. Soloist: Wolf Harden.

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Ferruccio Busoni composed the majority of his chamber music during the years 1878-90 at a time when he was fast emerging as a formidable pianist of the younger generation.