Its excesses—the piling on of disparate elements, the climaxes upon climaxes, the accelerations of accelerations—are surely deliberate. The notes describe it as a "strange beast", but observe even if it's not a masterpiece it can easily become an old friend. He was, in some ways, the prophet of a future that never came to pass, yet his idiosyncratic pluralism now seems strangely contemporary, as if he had anticipated the entire course of the century and tried to resolve its contradictions. In his own sole piano concerto, he went on to combine the two. Pezzo serioso. A decade ago, the same opera had a brief run at the Met—to date, the company’s only venture into Busoni’s unorthodox realm. As a teacher of composition, he influenced everyone from the avant-gardist Edgard Varèse to the populist Kurt Weill. Botstein and his orchestra thrived on the opening movement of Faust, finding a rugged unanimity. 1), Shostakovich: Symphony No. Alan Yentob to host programme about the impact of COVID-19 on the performing arts industry, Golden Globe nominations for Best Original Score announced, JS Bach: Harpsichord Concerto in D minor; Harpsichord Concerto in E; Harpsichord Concerto in D, BWV 1052. 17, BV 80, in 1878, at the age of twelve. In his pamphlet Sketch of a New Aesthetic Music, Busoni called for a return to classicism while speculating about microtonal writing and electronic instruments. We and our partners use cookies to personalize your experience, to show you ads based on your interests, and for measurement and analytics purposes. Busoni said that he could answer for every note in the score: a bold claim, since the notes run into uncountable thousands, yet persuasive. Such individuals are immortal not only through their work but through the radiation of their personality, through the gradual influence of their humanity.” Busoni’s sui generis five-movement Piano Concerto is a work that bears comparison to Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Mahler’s Eighth. The Busoni Piano Competition has decided not to give in and instead has developed an innovative new way of holding its preliminary stages: By turning this important first lap on the way to the grand finals in 2021 into The Glocal Piano Project, the competition is happening worldwide. Listen to Busoni: Piano Concerto by Gunnar Johansen on Apple Music. COMPOSERS: BusoniLABELS: HMVWORKS: Piano ConcertoPERFORMER: John Ogdon (piano); John Alldis Choir, RPO/Daniell RevenaughCATALOGUE NO: 5 73857 2 (available only from HMV stores) Reissue (1968)Busoni’s Piano Concerto is probably the most eccentric work ever composed in its genre, so perhaps it is not surprising that performances are still few and far between – few pianists, let alone orchestras and conductors, have the strength of stomach to take on its titanic structure. The Piano Concerto, which Busoni completed in 1904, is atypical of him, to the extent that any of his works are typical. Vivacamente, ma senza fretta," "Piano Concerto in C Major, Op. COMPOSERS: Busoni LABELS: HMV WORKS: Piano Concerto PERFORMER: John Ogdon (piano); John Alldis Choir, RPO/Daniell Revenaugh CATALOGUE NO: 5 73857 2 (available only from HMV stores) Reissue (1968) Busoni’s Piano Concerto is probably the most eccentric work ever composed in its genre, so perhaps it is not surprising that performances are still few and far between – few pianists, let … The coda, marked “La Stretta,” begins as an homage to Rossini and veers toward Dada, with crazed fragments of cadenzas dropped into the mayhem. Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto in C Major from 1904 is a truly majestic piece of music – simultaneously a demanding solo concerto and a symphony. For one thing, orchestras are naturally reluctant to undertake the expense of hiring both a soloist and a chorus for a single program. Still, live performances are uncommon. Busoni*, John Ogdon, Men's Voices Of The John Alldis Choir*, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra*, Daniell Revenaugh - Piano Concerto Op.39 ‎ (CD, RM) EMI Classics 0946 3 72467 2 6 Ferruccio BUSONI (1866-1924) Piano Concerto (1906) Kirill Gerstein (piano) Men of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus Boston Symphony Orchestra/Sakari Oramo Recorded live at Symphony Hall, Boston, USA, 10-11 March 2017 MYRIOS CLASSICS MYR024 [71:29] Once you meet Busoni’s Piano Concerto… 39/K 247 by Ferruccio Busoni Performer: John Ogdon (Piano) Conductor: Daniell Revenaugh Period: 20th Century Written: 1903-1904 Venue: No. Why does such a wildly entertaining creation remain such a rarity? Piers Lane, an inquisitive Australian pianist who has long been based in London, had the music well in hand at Carnegie last month. 39 - Cappello, Roberto Kompositör: Busoni, Ferruccio Dirigent: Vecchia, Francesco La Orkester: Rome Symphony Orchestra Mer av Busoni Busoni This is no heroic struggle against the orchestral mass; instead, the pianist is, much of the time, one desperately busy worker among many. Sign in to manage your newsletter preferences. The great Liszt moment of recent months was, rather, an intimate one. 123. In 1992, the New York City Opera presented Doktor Faust, Busoni’s phosphorescent magnum opus, which remained unfinished upon his death, in 1924. It has become something of a pianistic legend, and quite justifiably so: Ogdon, incandescently powerful and superbly accompanied by the RPO, still holds pride of place among the handful of recordings. Competition Rules 63rd Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition 2020/2021REGISTRATION1. In the last minute, a rocketing fast tempo takes over, the festival mood returns, and the music conjures itself away, with a Mephistophelean bang. The monster concerto has prospered on recordings. Here is a CD reissue that collectors have sought for decades: John Ogdon's magnificent 1967 EMI Angel recording of Ferruccio Busoni's Piano Concerto, Op. IFB 40 Key C major Piano Concerto Alt ernative. Concerto for Piano with Orchestra and Male Chorus, Op. The Busoni piano concerto is a rarity in concerts: it's long and it needs a male voice choir. 1053, 1054 (Vol. 17. Ferruccio Busoni said that there were essentially two types of piano concertos: the Mozart type, where the soloist has the spotlight, and the Beethoven type, where he or she supports the orchestra. Andante sostenuto, pensoso" and many more. Sample the fourth minute of the vast first movement here, where the piano's entrance is very Beethovenian despite the increased scope. Introductio. Every ten years or so, Ferruccio Busoni, the secret emperor of European music at the turn of the twentieth century, moves in from the margins of the repertory, momentarily seizes the attention of New York concertgoers, and then retreats into semi-obscurity, like Friedrich Barbarossa going to sleep beneath his mountain. Mahlerian in scope, the work is in five movements and goes on for well over an hour. A cosmopolitan who never belonged fully to one country or culture, he was born near Florence in 1866; spent his childhood in Trieste; studied in Vienna, Graz, and Leipzig; lived in Helsinki, Moscow, Boston, and New York; settled in Berlin and resettled in Bologna; spent much of the First World War in Zurich (where he met both Joyce and Lenin); and then returned to Berlin, where he died. Alfred Brendel was within his rights when he called the concerto “monstrously overwritten.” Yet it is also a remarkable feat of controlled chaos. Registration is carried out online by following the procedure indicated on the www.concorsobusoni.it website. By entering your details, you are agreeing to Classical Music terms and conditions and privacy policy. It came during a recital by the tenor Ian Bostridge and the composer-pianist Thomas Adès, at Carnegie. As the British critic Edward Dent wrote, “Busoni sits at the pianoforte, listens, comments, decorates, and dreams.”. No. 1 Studio, Abbey Road, London Length: 68 Minutes 6 Secs. BV 247 ; Op.39 I-Catalogue Number I-Cat. (The “impolite” passage was positively snotty.) The slipperiness of Busoni’s creative personality, his way of donning many masks, is frustrating and fascinating in equal measure. It has the mood of a street festival turned violent. Stream songs including "Piano Concerto, Op. This Concerto uses Bruckners discovery of the pulsing G Major chord in its first movement, The-result is one of the most wonderful piano concerto movements in piano history. With immense demands required of the soloist and the large forces needed, the Busoni Piano Concerto is surely the most grandiose ever written. Like a spirit of eternal mischief, the piano steals back in, first with low, drumming figures and then with keyboard-spanning arpeggios. Pezzo giocoso. I, III and V are represented respectively by Graeco-Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian architecture; II … It would be unfare to criticise the rest of the Concerto, it is all about where Busoni wanted … Perhaps Busoni is making another cryptic joke at the expense of the concerto genre, but the solo part is better understood as the composer’s spirit incarnated within the frame of his work. Kirill Gerstein’s March 2017 collaboration with Sakari Oramo and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Busoni’s mammoth Piano Concerto generated both intense interest and ecstatic reviews. The registration deadline is 39: I. Prologo e Introito. The original title was Concerto per piano-forte con accompagnamento di quartetto ad arco, Op. Ferruccio Busoni composed his Concerto for Piano and String Quartet in D minor, Op. 39: III. Piano Concerto (Busoni): lt;p|>The ||Piano Concerto|| in C major, Op. No. Allegro, dolce e solenne," "Piano Concerto in C Major, Op. Busoni: Piano Concerto; Turandot Suite Etc, an album by Ferruccio Busoni, John Ogdon on Spotify. Busoni’s Piano Concerto (composed 1902-04) is a piece that, by the composer’s own admission, is a summation of his first, late-Romantic period as a composer, a heady mixture of intoxicating (but never showy) virtuosity and turn-of-the-century mysticism. 3 in B flat; Gesang des Lebens. It's by the turn-of-the-20th-century Italian composer and piano virtuoso Ferruccio Busoni, who is probably best known for his adventurous transcriptions of Bach. Piano Concerto, Op. “A hymn to immoderation,” Bernard Holland aptly called it in the Times. It's certainly that for me. It opens with a pastiche of Brahms and then moves on to Beethoven-like strutting themes, Lisztian arpeggios, brooding spells of Wagnerian orchestration, delicate Chopinesque interludes, depressive Schumannesque detours, and madcap Rossinian crescendos. The beginning is emblematic: nocturnal whispers in the strings and winds, darkly churning figures in the lower register of the piano. As if this weren’t enough, the final movement has a male chorus intoning lines from Adam Oehlenschläger’s 1805 play, Aladdin—a hymn to Allah, no less. It’s profoundly funny, vaguely frightening music—a Nietzschean dance on the edge of a cliff. 39: II. The Tarantella began at a blistering tempo and never let up: from there to the end, with members of the Collegiate Chorale resonantly praising Allah, the concerto properly thundered. (Think of Liszt and Chopin on parade floats, playing simultaneously.) Consisting of five dramatic movements, the final movement includes a male chorus. (The published score is decorated with an etching inspired by Busoni’s own visualization of the piece: an array of temples interspersed with cypress trees and exotic birds, and Vesuvius erupting in the background. Busoni Piano Concerto Pietro Scarpini (piano); Bavarian Radio Choir & Symphony Orchestra/Rafael Kubelík First Hand Records FHR 64 69:58 mins . Busoni Piano Concerto/Hyperion C. Review by: ClassicsToday. The men’s chorus (!) At times, his phrasing had an irregular flow, the rhythmic shape of certain lines indistinct. It also renders Liberace unnecessary. He won early fame as a piano virtuoso, enrapturing crowds with his cool brilliance and irritating critics with his willful reconfigurations of canonical works. Adès let those notes hang in the air for a short infinity, and they were possibly the most beautiful sounds I heard all year. The composer Otto Luening once said that when Busoni played the piano he “made the instrument sound like an Aeolian harp as described by the poets, or like sound floating from a box of electronic resonators with apparently no relationship to hammered-string sound.” Adès achieved similarly eerie effects in Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnet No. Whilst the opening phrases of Busoni's 1904 Piano Concerto conjure up the memory of his mentor Brahms, this is in fact the kind of concerto that his friend Mahler might have written. “This performance of Busoni’s Piano Concerto is as superhuman as it is meant to be.” At the same time, there is something magnificently unserious about the work. It is regarded as one of Busoni's finest … There are five movements. You suspect that Busoni is mocking the bravura Romantic concerto as it emerged in the later nineteenth century, and, more widely, satirizing the gargantuan, post-Wagnerian apparatus of the music of his day. Ogdon’s recording from 1968 is almost entirely responsible for the renewal of interest in this work in the late 20th century. featured in the final movement also makes the piece incredibly unusual, both for the repertoire and in its construction. Also, the piano part is generally considered the most difficult in the concerto literature, and it is difficult in a way that may fail to satisfy the average crowd-pleasing virtuoso. Later, the tension slackened, for which the composer must accept some of the blame; Liszt’s architectural command was not as sure as that of Busoni, who emulated Liszt and also learned from his shortcomings. Busoni’s Piano Concerto (1902–1904) is the consummation of his first period and a monument to his phenomenal pianism. 13 in B flat minor (Babi Yar), Wetz: Symphony No. From an almost random heap of materials, Busoni fashions a solid, symmetrical structure, with a large slow movement at the center, two bustling scherzos on either side, and solemn-toned utterances as bookends. Conceived for string quartet, the piano can also be accompanied by a string orchestra as Concerto for Piano and Strings, the title under which it was published in 1987. Then again, a sense of imminent disaster is integral to the piece. A t 80 minutes, Busoni's Piano Concerto is claimed to be the longest piano concerto to have been performed in public. | These are the days my friends ». In the finale, as the orchestra and the chorus deliver their hymnal peroration, the piano disappears for a stretch. The score urges the performers to go for broke: there are passages marked “audaciously,” “frenziedly,” “raging,” “impolitely” (the last for a single-voiced piano line pounded out with both hands). Marc-André Hamelin has become one of the most active recording pianists of our time. (The disk is out of print, but it can be obtained through used-CD venders.) Like his contemporaries Mahler and Strauss, Busoni took an interest in Nietzsche, and the Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music includes an extended passage from Beyond Good and Evil—one imagining a “more evil and mysterious music,” which “knows how to roam among great, beautiful, lonely beasts of prey.” At his best, Busoni matches the tone of Nietzsche’s later writing, with its unstable bombast, its selfcancelling ironies, its love of dancing figures, its prophetic flights and apocalyptic crashes. The work will return to Carnegie next May, during the Spring for Music festival, with Marc-André Hamelin, the Canadian archmagus of the piano, joining the New Jersey Symphony. This concert brings the mini-series 'Busoni - The Romantic Modernist' to its epic conclusion. Advertisement. His title-page design symbolizes the work. Preview, buy and download songs from the album Busoni: Piano Concerto, including "Piano Concerto in C Major, Op. Snare drum and tambourine drive the rhythms; wrong notes intrude on popular vamps. The endless arpeggios, double-octave runs, and other splashy effects are often marked at relatively low volume, or are partly covered by the orchestral din. Having returned the Busoni to circulation, in the second half of his December concert Botstein led the Faust Symphony of Liszt, whose two-hundredth anniversary, in October, inspired various solo recitals in New York but drew little attention locally to Liszt’s bigger orchestral and choral pieces. Buy the album for $18.99. 14: Busoni: Piano Concerto Weighing in at 70 minutes and featuring a male chorus in the final movement – one of a mere handful of piano concertos that … When I asked Hamelin about the experience of performing the concerto—he has done it more than twenty times—he told me, “It's an especially joyful feeling to be allowed to be almost completely silent during the fifth movement, this after having had your blood pressure raised several points during the Tarantella.” The solemnity does not persist, though. The final bars contain music of the utmost simplicity: three A-flat-major chords, with falling two-note figures suspended above them. The concerto, by contrast, is a gaudy, unapologetically over-the-top piece, stuffed with references to nineteenthcentury Romantic styles. In his final two decades, Busoni favored subdued colors and shadowy forms, his music always on the point of vanishing over the horizon. Main Register now to continue reading Thank you for visiting Gramophone and making use of our archive of more than 50,000 expert reviews, features, awards and blog articles. In his final two decades, Busoni favored subdued colors and shadowy forms, his music always on the point of vanishing over the horizon. You can unsubscribe at any time. A Zarathustra spirit animates the concerto’s fourth movement, “All’ Italiana (Tarantella),” which may be the most purely kinetic music written between the retirement of Rossini and the heyday of Stravinsky. Of the few more recent versions, Marc-André Hamelin on Hyperion is a fine choice, bringing out the tenderer aspects of the music as well as the elementally demanding ones; Mark Elder’s CBSO violins offer some luscious portamentos, too, though the recording is slightly let down in the final movement by a forced-sounding choir. He gave a fiercely accurate performance, achieving a sound of notable strength and weight. Botstein, on the podium, bobbled several crucial shifts of tempo, most obviously at the beginning of the second movement; there, and in a few other places, pianist and orchestra seemed to go their own ways before getting back in synch. It looks like what might have appeared on the back of the dollar bill if the Art Nouveau movement had taken over the United States Mint.)