Volume 8 features two compositions from Busoni's teenage years (1881-83). Charming and engaging works which already reveal an inventive and personal accommodation wth mid-19th century Romanticism.

Transcriptions occupied Ferruccio Busoni from early in his career, but his famously Romantic version of the Chaconne in D minor contrasts with the later and more austere Sonatina brevis based on Bach's Fantasy and Fugue in D minor, BWV 905. Music from Bach's The Art of Fugue is invoked in the rarely heard Edizione minore version of the Fantasia contrappuntistica, and the Ten Chorale Preludes include the glorious Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme. Sir Edward Elgar considered Busoni 'the greatest musical mind of his time,' and Wolf Harden's playing of Busoni has been described as 'the clear current benchmark' (BBC Music Magazine)

Busoni: Turandot Suite - 2 Studies for 'Doktor Faust'

Busoni: Complete Works for Cello and Piano

Wolf Harden continues his survey of piano works by Busoni with this penultimate volume in the series. Featuring three of Busoni's strikingly individual Sonatinas, the Drei Albumblatter and more.

“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.

Busoni was a musician of rare versatility – a pianist, composer, writer and editor. His deep study of Bach and Mozart was essential to his own thoughts and creativity. It also bore much compositional fruit in the form of transcriptions and adaptations. The most famous transcription surely is his piano arrangement of the Chaconne from Bach's D-minor Partita for unaccompanied violin.

Doktor Faust was left incomplete at the time of Busoni’s death. Intended as his masterpiece, the opera’s genesis was complex and long. Based on Goethe’s tragic play, the story of Faust’s pact with the devil is well known but the opera’s structure represents Busoni’s unique conception, cast in two Prologues, a beautiful orchestral Intermezzo and three scenes. Exploring ideas of rationality and metaphysical doubt as well as the concepts of artifice and pretence inherent in operatic performance, the result is one of the most creative and unsettling of Busoni’s works.

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.

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

BACH (arr. Busoni) Capriccio on the Departure of his Most Beloved Brother, BWV 992. Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564. Toccata and Fugue in d, BWV 565. 10 Choral Preludes. BACH (arr. Petri) "Sheep May Safely Graze". BACH (arr. Zadora) Flute Sonata in E? , BWV 1011: Siciliana. Organ Chorale, BWV 751. BUSONI Prelude and Fugue in D (after Bach BWV 532). Choral-Vorspiel nach Bach. Das Calvarium. Floh-Sprung —Canon for Two Voices with Obbligato Bass. Canon Variations and Fugue. BUSONI (arr. Groschopp) Improvisation on the Bach Chorale Wie wohl ist mir, o Freund der Seelen. WEISS-BUSONI Salon-Polka • Holger Groschopp (pn) • CAPRICCIO 5198 (2 CDs: 120:36)


Like every other Golden Age pianist, Ferruccio Busoni romped in the playground of transcriptions, batting around other composers’ tunes in the spirit of competitive gamesmanship. The ghosts of Liszt and Tausig were leaning over the fence watching them play. Today many of these wowsers—dated American slang for raising one’s eyebrows in amazement—sound more like transgressions than transcriptions. But Busoni was a serious Bach scholar and editor, and when it came to the music on this 2-CD set, his arrangements for piano have survived proudly.


Bach must hold the record for the most transcribed composer in history, and Busoni’s versions aren’t unique, especially in iconic works such as the Chaconne in D Minor for violin and Stokowski’s showstopper, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. But when you see Bach-Busoni on the program, you can rest assured that the arrangement will be sober, true to Bach’s original (not the same as being faithful to every note), and a technical tour de force . Busoni was generous with doublings, thirds, and sixths, often laying them on to the limit of pianistic technique. He avoided the vulgarity of rolled arpeggios, however. Audiences expected a blend of church and sideshow.


Holger Groschopp has undertaken an extensive project to record Busoni’s output in this genre; there’s a previous box set of four CDs covering many other composers besides Bach. This new release focuses on organ and harpsichord music, where the earlier set included some Bach violin arrangements. Fortunately, Groschopp’s program is varied and intriguing, which he details in his excellent notes, and I didn’t miss the Chaconne in D Minor, probably the most popular of Busoni’s Bach transcriptions today, leaving aside the 10 short chorale preludes used as encores. Since these two disks contain 44 tracks, I’ll confine myself to a few general comments.


First there’s the issue of organ versus piano. Busoni recognized that there are losses and gains when the organ loft is exchanged for Carnegie Hall. A piano virtuoso must work magic to create the illusion of a pipe organ’s continuous legato, its colorful voicings that mimic woodwinds and brass, and its enormous power. Two hands must also do the work of the organist’s combined hands and feet. On the plus side, the piano has one huge advantage: touch. The gradations of touch that Horowitz employs in Busoni’s arrangement of the Chorale Prelude Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (DG) are hypnotic, and for me, more moving than what an organist can produce. Busoni’s extant piano rolls indicate that he used considerable rubato in Bach, something generally associated with Romanticism, not historical purity.


Groschopp is an established pianist in his native Berlin, with close ties to the Berlin Philharmonic and an international tour schedule (just as impressive, he also studied voice with Fischer-Dieskau). He brings technical assurance to the most difficult arrangements here, and comparison with the legendary Russian pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva is hardly to Groschopp’s disadvantage. He has chosen to imitate the evenness of an organist’s touch. He avoids crescendos and decrescendos, and maintains a steady tempo. In other words, he eschews the piano’s advantages, deployed so eloquently by Horowitz and Busoni himself.


I grant that this sort of literalism will feel more “authentic” to some listeners, but it robs this otherwise superb set of having much personality. That’s not the same as accusing Groschopp of tedium—he held my attention with a delightful range of works, from the mighty Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C (BWV 564) to a 24-second miniature where, as part of a suite written on the departure of a beloved brother, Bach imitates the postman’s galloping horse and tooting horn, one of the rare occasions where he wrote program music. The journey features familiar signposts in the land of Bach such as “Sleepers Awake” and “Sheep May Safely Graze.” At the end we get a polka. I’ll tease you by not revealing what that’s about.


I sat myself down to listen with the resignation of a pupil braced for a scholarly lecture, but the entire experience turned out to be fascinating. The treasure trove of Bach’s genius has tempted countless arrangers, and thanks to Busoni, Groschopp drops a shower of gold coins in our laps.


FANFARE: Huntley Dent

This album is, simply, a necessary addition to the Busoni discography, carried off with panache. A studio recording, sound is uncramped, gutsily close, and incisively detailed. Sine qua non for the Busoni aficionado, and enthusiastically recommended to all who care for the literature of the piano.

- Adrian Corleonis Fanfare (From review of Capriccio 10896 which contains the same performances.)

Busoni: Arlecchino

Ferruccio Busoni (Empoli 1866 – Berlin 1924) died the same year as Puccini and was born when Puccini was a child, yet he was way more than an opera composer. While he lived several years in Trieste and some time in Bologna, he mainly lived abroad and spent the second half of his life in Berlin. Way more than a composer, he was a wide-ranging artist and musician, an acclaimed concert pianist and sought-after piano teacher, a learned reviser of piano music, and the author of many and varied pieces. Busoni was also an aesthete, an intellectual, a music reformer, and author of texts on musical topics. A child prodigy, he wrote the Symphonische Suite for orchestra at the age of 17.
Nicola Bignami and Lucija Majstorovic brilliantly face the arduous task of performing the two monumental and demanding sonatas for violin and piano that the composer wrote at twenty-four (first sonata) and at thirty-two (second sonata), in which the equal and dialogical relationship between the two instruments combines with a wealth of invention with respect for the great tradition.

Classical Music