Busoni: An Die Jugend / Fantasia Contrappuntistica

Description

Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) Piano Music, Vol. 1Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto Ferruccio Busoni was born at Empoli, near Florence, in 1866, the only child of musical parents. His father was a virtuoso clarinetist, while his mother, who came from Trieste, was a pianist of German ancestry. Busoni remained deeply grateful to his father for insisting on a study of the music of Bach, then underrated in Italy, and of German repertoire. In 1874 he made his first concert appearance in Trieste, playing works by Handel, Hummel and Schumann. In the autumn of 1875 he went with his father to Vienna, where he soon made an impression by his ability as a pianist, composer and improviser and was able to benefit from the rich cultural life that the city offered. Here he heard and himself played to Liszt, met Brahms and Anton Rubinstein and enjoyed the friendship of Karl Goldmark. It was on the advice of Brahms that Busoni moved in 1886 to Berlin to benefit from the teaching of Carl Reinecke, and from there he moved for a time to Helsinki Conservatory, where he influenced a new generation of Finnish composers. In Moscow he was offered a position at the Conservatory, but chose rather to continue his career as a pianist, with concert-?¡tours to America and elsewhere. In 1894 he settled in Berlin, his home, except for a period in Switzerland during the war, until his death in 1924. He did much to promote the music of Liszt and to encourage, in concerts that he conducted, contemporary music. In his own performances as a pianist he won wide popularity with audiences. As a composer he was versatile, turning in particular to opera in his later years, yet here, as in much of his other music, he remained a unique, remarkable and isolated figure, combining in his work elements of Italian sensibility with a predominantly German leaning towards counterpoint and harmonic experiment that was not widely acceptable. His transcriptions, of Bach in particular, followed the tradition of Liszt, a re-creation of the music on which they were based, with a freedom of interpretation that is only now, once again, reaching audiences.Keith AndersonFerruccio Busoni was one of the most forward-looking composer-pianists there has ever been and music for his own instrument makes up a great deal of his work. Bach was a pervasive presence from the beginning, both in the contrapuntal aspect of Busoni's music, and in his repertoire as a performer; a process of assimilation culminating in the Bach-Busoni Edition, published in 1918. While his later Bach work is creative interpretation rather than arrangement, strength of personality is inherent in his earliest transcriptions.In Busoni's transcription of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV565, made in 1900, the rhetorical nature of the Toccata, notably its imperious octave passagework, is ideally transferred to the piano medium. The Fugue proceeds at a moderate tempo, Busoni separating out the lines within the texture, employing the sustaining peda