Busoni: Variations And Fugue On Chopin's Prelude In C Minor

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Busoni Volume 2. Bach-Busoni: Chaconne in D minor, B33Busoni: Etude en forme de variations, K206Anhang zu Siegfried Och's 'Kommt ein Vogel geflogen', K222Tema con variazioni in C, K6Inno Variato, K16Variationen und Fuge in freier Form über Fr. Chopin's c-moll Präludium, K213Dante Michelangeli Benvenuto Ferruccio Busoni was born at Empoli, near Florence, in 1866, the only child of an Italian clarinettist father and a pianist mother of German paternal ancestry. He made his début as a pianist in Trieste in 1874, going to Vienna for study and performance the following year. On the advice of Brahms he moved to Leipzig in 1885, studying with Carl Reinecke, before teaching spells at the conservatories in Helsinki and Moscow. Performance occupied much of his attention until the turn of the new century, when composition began to assume a new importance, though never dominance, in his career. Apart from a period in Zurich during the First World War, he lived in Berlin from 1894 until his death.The essence of Busoni's music lies in its synthesis of his Italian and German ancestry, emotion and intellect, the imaginative and the rigorous. Despite acclaim from composer and performer colleagues, his music remained the preserve of an informed few. Neither inherently conservative nor demonstratively radical, his harmonic and tonal innovations were bound up with an essentially re-creative approach to the musical past which has only gained wider currency in recent decades.As the most forward-looking composer-pianist there has yet been, Busoni wrote music particularly for his own instrument, the largest part of his output. Bach was a pervasive presence from the beginning, both in the contrapuntal aspect of his music, and in his repertoire as a performer, a process of assimilation culminating in the Bach-Busoni Edition, published in 1918. While Busoni's later Bach work is more creative interpretation than arrangement, strength of personality is inherent in his earliest transcriptions.Technically and aesthetically, Busoni's transcription of Bach's Chaconne in D minor, from the Solo Violin Partita No.2, BWV 1004, though relatively early, remains among his most formidable. Arranged in Boston in 1892, while on his first tour of the United States, it conveys the linear clarity of the original work through elaborate piano textures derived from Brahms and Liszt. At the same time, the dynamic terracing of the music's variational stages gives it a cumulative momentum, which anticipates several of the Bach-inspired works from Busoni's maturity.1883 was a decisive year for Busoni. Arriving in Vienna at the beginning of a two-year stay, he made the acquaintance of Brahms, whose influence turned his composition from the emulation of Baroque, Classical and early Romantic models, towards an idiom of the present. The immediate result of this reorientation were the Six Etudes, published the following year as Opus 16. The existence of four other substantial etudes, ho