Busoni: Music For 2 Pianos

Description

Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924)Music for Two PianosFerruccio Busoni was universally regarded as one of thelate-Romantic era's most remarkable piano virtuosi, andwas undoubtedly one of its most fascinating composers,even if the searching intellectualism of much of hismusic only slowly won it an audience. Despite a selfconsciousquest for compositional originality, Busonihad a keen awareness of the greatness of the Westernmusical tradition, and his engagement with the music ofBach not only produced some of the finest arrangementsof that composer's music for piano, but also stimulatedBusoni's own creative imagination in many other ways.As a writer too, he was both thought-provoking andinfluential. Essays such as Sketch of a New Aesthetic ofMusic (1907) not only helped to define his own creativeapproach, but also laid down a philosophical challengeto his contemporaries. Given his penchant for verbalself-analysis, it is perhaps not surprising that thecontents of this disc of his works for two pianos wereeffectively suggested by the composer himself. All thepieces are based on works by Mozart or Bach, withvarying infusions of Busoni himself, ranging frommodest alterations in the former to the creation ofcompletely new compositions in the latter.On finishing the arrangement of Mozart'ssurprisingly stern and weighty Fantasie f??r eineOrgelwalze, K.608, (Fantasy for a Barrel-Organ), in1922, Busoni recommended that it could be included asa specific part of a larger programme of his two-pianoworks. Although the Fantasy is effectively an overturein the Italian style, consisting of fast-slow-fast sections,Busoni believed that it should, along with thedeliciously sprightly finale of Mozart's Piano Concertoin F major, K.459, which he had already arranged fortwo pianos under the title Duettino Concertante, formthe central section of a larger and rather unorthodox'sonata'. The first movement of this sonata would be hisImprovisation on the Bach Chorale 'Wie wohl ist mir, oFreund der Seele', completed in 1916. This piece isbased upon a set of variations that Busoni had originallycomposed as the last movement of his second violinsonata in 1900. As he himself explained in a preface tothe work, it had long been his intention to arrange themovement for two pianos, but when he finally came tothe task his changed feelings about the music aftersixteen years, and the new possibilities and restrictionscreated by replacing the violin part with one for asecond piano resulted in a virtually independentcomposition, and one that reflected the increasing desirefor clarity in his compositional approach.As the final movement of this notional sonata,Busoni proposed the two-piano version of hismagisterial Fantasia Contrappuntistica, no doubtthinking of the vast contrapuntal finale of Beethoven's'Hammerklavier' Sonata, Op.106. The FantasiaContrappuntistica is Busoni's most ambitious andhermetic piano work, and as a result tends to dwarf thepieces preceding it, despite its obvious connecti