Busoni: Piano Music, Vol. 3

Wolf Harden

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Cat No: 8570249

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Release Date: 01 January 2007

Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 747313024971

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: BUSONI

Description
Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) Piano Music • 3 Dante Michelangeli Benvenuto Ferruccio Busoni was born at Empoli (near Florence) in 1866, the only child of a clarinettist father and pianist mother. He made his piano début in Trieste in 1874, going to Vienna the next year. On the advice of Brahms he moved to Leipzig in 1885, studying with Carl Reinecke, before teaching in Helsinki and Moscow. Performance occupied much of his time until the turn of the century, when composing began to assume a new importance, though never dominance, in his career. Apart from living in Zurich during the First World War, he made his home in Berlin from 1894 until his death in 1924.The essence of Busoni's music lies in a synthesis of his Italian and German ancestry: emotion and intellect, imagination and discipline. Despite acclaim from both composer and performer colleagues, his work for long remained the preserve of an informed few. Neither inherently conservative nor demonstratively radical, his harmonic and tonal innovations were bound up with a re-creative approach to the musical past that has only gained wider currency over recent decades.Bach was a pervasive presence from the outset, whether in the contrapuntal aspect of Busoni's music, or his repertoire as performer, culminating in the Bach-Busoni Edition. While Busoni's later Bach-related work is more interpretation than arrangement, his personality is inherent in the earliest transcriptions. One such is the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C major, BWV 564. Among several reworkings of organ pieces made around 1900, and allotted to Volume Three of 'Bach-Busoni', it represents the virtuoso transcription, derived from Brahms and Liszt, at its most commanding.A peremptory call to attention, and the Toccata sets off in determined fashion, the theme given in unison octaves before opening out into expansive part-writing across the keyboard. At length the theme is restated and the piece brought to a powerful conclusion. By contrast, the Adagio receives a limpid and affecting treatment, moving forward in measured paragraphs towards a brief climax before regaining its initial poise. An imposing cadenza-like passage prepares for the Fugue: among Bach's most witty and animated, this expounds its main and subsidiary ideas with due purposefulness, before moving into a stretto that draws constituent parts into a decisive and affirmative conclusion.The years 1883-84 saw the composing of the young Busoni's most impressive and virtuosic piano works, not least the Sonata in F minor and the Variations and Fugue after Chopin [Naxos 8.555699]. Of the smaller pieces from this time, the Trois Morceaux, published in Vienna as the composer's Op. 4, 5 and 6respectively, are among the most engaging. The Scherzo is a finely-worked miniature whose incisive outer sections enclose a more lilting, though not necessarily more relaxed, trio which returns as the basis for an understated coda.
Tracklisting