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Piano Concerto Op. XXIX. Marc-André Hamelin, Piano,
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Mark Elder
Hyperion CDA67143 74m DDD.
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Probably the most important and singular release of this year, this Busoni Concerto would definitely have made it for the Gramophone Awards. It is indeed a suitable jewel in the crown of Hyperion's Romantic Piano Concerto and continues to confirm the superb enterprising brilliance of this series.
The latest issues were not really memorable, Kullak, Dreyschock, Brull, a sound coupling but nothing overtly sensational, the Busoni definitely is and more besides. As Michael Spring espouses in his introduction, Busoni's reputation as a composer has suffered considerably as he is mainly remembered as a colossal pianist. John Ogdon's recording with Revenaugh has been the standard recommendation of this work for decades and it was the double LP Concert Classics set that kept me constant company when listening (most of the time open-mouthed) to this fabulous recording. Hamelin is the supreme virtuoso, from that titanic piano entry to the devilish fingerwork of the Pezzo giocoso through to the divinity of the cantico. Occasionally the sheer fantasy of Ogdon's playing is captivating but constantly I found myself returning to Hamelin's unobtrusive virtuosity especially with a recording that confirms the Symphony Hall's fabled acoustic. Hamelin's Prologo e Introito is sublime with some dazzling piano playing and an orchestral contribution of great beauty especially in the 'Pastorale' conclusion (Ronald Stevenson). The central movements are also quite winningly done especially the three-movement Pezzo giocoso, a true display of fearsome virtuosity and magnificent genius. Comparing Ogdon and Hamelin is difficult, I am a great fan of the former but the dash and polish of Hamelin is also magnificent. Tarantella is also quite fantastic with a full-throated orchestral accompaniment coaxed along with panache by Elder. The concluding pages of that movement are utterly absorbing, power and harmony make strange bedfellows but all is consumed in the final movement of Babylonian proportions (Stevenson again). It is a question of the futility of life almost reminiscent of Mahler's magnificent Eighth Symphony with a chorus of unhallowed beauty rising alongside harmonic shifts. Both versions are quite flawless here although Hyperion has the better recording and Ogden's is now beginning to show its age. I did not care much for the remastered Ogdon, indeed I prefer the wholesome rounded sound of the LPs, a crisp alternative to the CD. Ronald Stevenson's outstanding booklet note is reproduced for the benefit of all and was an awesome eye-opener for me; it will definitely be for those who buy this disc. Crystal clear recording and outstanding presentation continue to add to the allure of this spectacular release. However it should definitely redefine the status of this superb concerto as one of the most important this century.
Gerald Fenech
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BACH/BUSONI
Kun-Woo Paik, Piano
DECCA 467 358-2 [70.35]
Toccata in C Major for Organ, BWV 564
1. Preludio, Quasi Improvvisando (6.59)
2. Intermezzo (6.04)
3. Fuga (4.23)
Choral Preludes for Organ
4. Komm, Gott Schopfer,Heiliger Geist, BWV 667 (2.04)
5. Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimmer, BWV 645 (4.15)
6. Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 659 (6.04)
7. Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein, BWV 734 (2.06)
8. Ich ruf Zu dir Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 639 (4.11)
9. Jesus Christus, unser Heiland, BWV 665 (6.07)
10. In dir ist Freude, BWV 615 (2.01)
11. Herr Gott, nun schliuss den Himmel auf BWV 617 (3.06)
12. Durch Adam's Fall ist ganz verderbt, BWV 637 (2.29)
13. Durch Adam's Fall ist ganz verderbt, BWV 705 (5.26)
14. Chaconne from partita No. 2 for Violin, BWV 1004 (14.49
When reviewing a CD such as this, one must first decide whether to review it as if it were music by Bach or Busoni. In essence, it is both, and neither. Busoni was a great lover of Bach's music, and, as a homage to Bach, as well as a way of making his works more accessible, made his own, personal transcriptions of various works for piano.
This disc includes 14 works, originally for organ, for the most part, along with the famous transcription of the Chaconne from the D Major violin partita. Some of these transcriptions recall Bach's music almost exactly, such as the choral prelude BWV 645, where the piano evokes the atmosphere of the work. Others sound too pianistic, such as the choral prelude BWV 734, where the sound is confused and too rapid for the themes to come through clearly.
Kun-Woo Paik is, in any case, an excellent performer of the organ works. His sensitivity and phrasing are admirable, and the recording is near-perfect. Yet, as one familiar with Bach's music played "non-transcribed", I cannot help but wonder if he is comfortable with this repertory. This is a romanticised vision of Bach; far from what some pianists, such as Murray Perahia, achieve, and light-years away from the great Bach pianists such as Glen Gould or Rosalyn Tureck.
But, in the end, this isn't Bach. Listening to the famous Chaconne, one is struck by the lack of clear direction of the performance. Originally written for solo violin, and, indeed, one of Bach's masterpieces requiring the utmost virtuosity, this work translates poorly to the piano. Paik's interpretation shifts among many different registers - at first his sound is almost martial, then it slips into a more pastoral tone, before wandering off into a mixture of different registers that leave the listener slightly confused as his virtuosity takes over. Then it slides into a Beethoven-like attack on the piano's very core, with fortissimo after fortissimo. (I may be wrong here, because I have never seen Busoni's score for this work - Paik may simply be reproducing the dynamics indicated by Busoni). There are too many changes in tempo and dynamics for my taste; but I prefer Bach as his music was written.
If you especially like these works as such, then this disc is worth a listen. The performance is interesting, and the recording excellent. But if you are a real lover of Bach, this is not for you.
An attractive recording of some of Busoni's transcriptions of Bach - neither Bach nor Busoni, but some of the music works well on piano.
Kirk McElhearn |
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Five Great Chaconnes - piano transcriptions by Brahms, Busoni, Liszt & Raff of music by J.S.Bach and Händel.
Walid Akl, piano
Pavane ADW 7255 1991 DDD 74:54
Bach's magisterial Chaconne for violin (from the Partita No.2) is one of his towering achievements and it held a particular fascination for 19th. century composers. As in a music theory examination, this CD invites us to "compare and contrast" three piano transcriptions of it by masters of the romantic era - Brahms, Busoni and Raff - programmed one after the other. It makes fascinating, but rather daunting listening.
Lebanese pianist Walid Akl begins with Liszt's romantic, but surprisingly sober and reserved, transcriptions of the solemn Sarabande and the short, and rather slight Chaconne from Handel's opera "Almira". The serious mood is lightened by Handel's un-transcribed and quite substantial Chaconne and 21 Variations which follows. In both Handel works Akl adopts a "baroque" pianism which does seem rather dry and mechanical, although he isn't helped by a shallow recording acoustic and a piano tone which lacks warmth.
The remaining 48 minutes consists of the three Bach Chaconne transcriptions in chronological order - Raff, Brahms and Busoni. All the qualities of Raff's orchestral transcription (recently so ably demonstrated on CD by Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Philharmonic - Chandos CHAN 9835) are present in his piano version. The grandeur of Bach's conception is never masked but Raff's transcription is emphatically romantic - the ruminative opening passage reeks of tortured introspection before being swept away in the first dramatic surge of the music. Drama is indeed the essence of Raff's transcription. There are huge variations in texture as Raff weaves counter melodies in contrapuntal contrast - all well captured by Akl, who clearly revels in the virtuoso opportunities offered by Raff. This is a good performance of a masterly work.
The contrast with the Brahms version is very telling. It is a spare piece and the most literal of the three transcriptions - Brahms deliberately wrote it for the left hand alone in order to better duplicate the restrictions of the violin. At almost 17 minutes, it is 90 seconds longer than the gloriously romantic Raff and in it Akl returns to the baroque style of playing which characterised his Handel works. Zolotarev in his new rival performance is better here (Ars FCD 368 388).
With Busoni, late romanticism appears. It is clear - and indeed acknowledged in the CD's insert notes - that Busoni was indebted to Raff for providing him with the basis for his own transcription, which is much less restrained than Brahms' and more extrovert than Raff's. It is dramatic without being too showy and still remains true to Bach, although perhaps rather more distantly than its two predecessors. As with the Raff, Akl is well up to the technical demands of the work and plays with romantic passion.
Technically, the sound is rather hard and has little depth. Akl's deliberately contrasted playing styles between the baroque Brahms and Handel and the romantic Busoni and Raff pieces is appropriate, but overdone. The programming is intriguing, but not very practical. Whilst the Brahms is indeed like a sharp sorbet between two rich courses, the meal itself is still too rich and unvaried. A CD to sample selectively, then, and at its most successful in the Busoni and the Raff.
Mark Thomas
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THE LEGENDARY BUSONI RECORDINGS
by Paul Jacobs
«I was absolutely drawn in by his fantastic sense of harmony. And there's an emotional range that I find absolutely unique. There's no question about it - Ferruccio Busoni is the great underrated master of the twentieth century.» The words of pianist Paul Jacobs, in conversation with record producer Teresa Sterne, shortly before his untimely death in 1983 from AIDS - which was still an unnamed disease at that time.
Jacobs was one of New York City's outstanding musical personalities. He gave premieres of many important new works, yet he always found the time to re-examine music of the past. In 1961, Leonard Bernstein appointed him official pianist of the New York Philharmonic, a post he held for the remaining 22 years of his life. Between 1976 and 1979, he made his legendary Busoni recordings for Nonesuch. They were issued on LP, but when LPs went out of print, so did they. At long last they have returned, on compact disc, from Arbiter Recording Company of Linden Hill Station, New York.
Through his playing and his program notes, Mr. Jacobs provided a fine introduction to this creative, under-performed, surprisingly influential composer and theoretician, whose friends and students included Mahler, Schoenberg, Strauss, Stravinsky, Varèse, and Weill, but whose name is still most familiar to music lovers in its hyphenated form, usually preceded by the name «Bach».
This two CD set does include Busoni's Chorale Preludes after Bach and Brahms, plus his own Six Sonatinas (1910-1920) and his Six Polyphonic Etudes (1923). It also contains some fascinating, trend-setting etudes by three other composers: Stravinsky's early, post-Romantic Op. 7 collection from 1908 (the last time he used an opus number), Bartok's Op. 18 set from 1918 (which shares some feverish rhythms and sumptuous harmonies with his ballet The Miraculous Mandarin from that same year), and Messiaen's Four Rhythmic Etudes from 1950 (which are based on folk themes from Papua, New Guinea).
The digital remasterings are a bit murky and bottom-heavy. But then, the great beauty in CD transfers is what you don't hear: no snap, crackle and pop from repeated playings. These recordings wear well. Their subtleties in texture and color are clearly drawn, and will remain so.
John Judson McGrody
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Auf diesem Album:
Konzertstück op.31a f.Klavier & Orchester
Indianische Fantasie op.44
Indianisches Tagebuch
Berceuse élégiaque
J. Swann, piano
Montpellier PO, G. Masini
Agora, DDD, 92
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The Six Sonatinas
Indianisches Tagebuch
Toccata
Roland Pontinen (piano)
rec. September 20-23, 1999, Kammermusikstudio des SWR, Stuttgart
CPO 999 702-2 [74.47] Mid-price
Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) looked both to the future - in a written essay from 1907 he suggests how music might develop with microtones and electronics - and to the past. He revered Bach and Mozart. Busoni's mature musical language is a mix of classical foundation while enveloping new developments. He was aware of and embraced what Schoenberg was doing.
What, for convenience, I'll term as Busoni's compositional schizophrenia, coalesced into a very distinctive voice. His Italian father and German mother may have given him the polarity between warmth and lyricism, and formality and highbred thinking; the latter intensified by his German training. In addition, he was a virtuoso pianist - Claudio Arrau, late in life, said that Busoni was the greatest pianist he had ever heard - one attracted to Lisztian bravura, Bachian foundation and Mozartian clarity.
His six Sonatinas reflect these inputs. Written between 1910 and 1920, they might be considered a musical diary in that they offer a snapshot of his compositional thinking during an ever-developing decade of expressional identity. This was a decade that lead up to his early death and unfinished opera, Doktor Faust. Faust's subject of seeking knowledge and experience, and new futures was central to Busoni himself.
In all the music on this CD, Busoni's clarity of thought is evident, even when he is extending harmonic possibilities, experimenting with music's 'divine' expression, and communing, possibly, with a mystical deity, possibly God, maybe the Devil, perhaps both - or something occult-manifested, which he had an interest in. These ambiguities though shouldn't be too dominant is assessing his music.
From his rather conventional, but attractive, early works, Busoni's balancing of tradition and experimentation created a distinctive, personal and fascinating corpus of music. There's nothing else quite like the hypnotically beautiful 'Sarabande' from Doktor Faust - an otherworldly creation of exposited existentialism. His piano music also probes the boundaries of reality.
After the First Sonatina's Mozartian elegance and Bachian underpinning, which Busoni chisels away at as he begins to unleash Lisztian tidal-waves of sound (thus Busoni is encapsulated in Sonatina Brevis, ironically the longest of the six!), Sonatina Seconda (1912) comes as a huge shock. Although harmonically grounded, the sheer unpredictability of this brief masterpiece, contrasted with the sense of Busoni's absolute control of boundary-pushing, is fantastically absorbing. Late Liszt meets Schoenberg might sum it up, but that would be to overlook Busoni's individuality, his working things out for himself - the staccato outburst and ensuing rhythmic counterpoint from 0'50" reminds me of Tippett (only seven at the time)! Pontinen invests more fantasy into his reading than Geoffrey Tozer (CHANDOS CHAN 9394) - 9'44" against Tozer's 8'02" (my timings, not the booklets') - and, aided by a closer, more detailed recording, examines the music closely, revealing its modernist tendencies rather more comprehensively.
Ad usum infantis - Sonatina No. 3 (1915) - returns to a classical simplicity - uncomplicated and delightful. No. 4 (1917, In diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII) is the least interesting of the set, I think. An initially 'pure' snow-white Christmas scene, which becomes restless, is halted by a chorale before a more agitated 'dance', which dissipates into a restrained commentary on what has gone before.
Sonatinas 5 and 6 are based on other composers' music. The Fifth (1918) - Sonatina Brevis "in signo Joannis Sebastiani Mahni" - is a free re-working of Bach's D minor Fantasy and Fugue, possibly an attempt, on Busoni's part, to improve music, that may not be by Bach, which the booklet note suggests has 'many errors and weaknesses'. As re-thought by Busoni, the work's profile, irrespective of whoever originally composed it, is heightened because of Busoni's harmonic overlay, his re-signing of it, and his re-creativity.
No. 6, Kammerfantasie super Carmen, takes Bizet as its starting-point, a medley of the opera's familiar tunes; it's not a standard paraphrase though, for although Bizet's melodies are intact and recognisable, Busoni - his own figuration and harmonic imprint always discernible - lucidly elaborates beyond the standard formula of a concert showpiece.
Roland Pontinen's affection for Carmen matches Busoni's interest in it. Throughout this CD, Pontinen proves to be a subtle, sensitive and perceptive guide through this intriguing music. He's well recorded too.
The four-movement Indian Diary is contemporary with Sonatina No. 3, and shows a similar concern for clarity as Busoni utilises 'Motifs of America's Redskins' into his studies (Busoni was living in the States). Go straight to the third for a wonderful tune, one that reminds of Dvorák, a 'New World' allusion of course, but one can imagine him delighting in it.
Finally, the Toccata, concurrent with the final Sonatina, is overtly virtuosic and deeply contemplative, its final stretches offer a presage of rigorous Hindemith, and is a piece much admired by Alfred Brendel (Philips issued a Brendel recording some while ago - only on LP? - as part of a 'live and previously unissued' recital, which to my chagrin I cannot locate). Pontinen matches the technical demands and searches out Busoni's emotional recesses.
I'm not aware that Pontinen has previously recorded Busoni; if CPO wish to follow this CD, then a coupling of Fantasia contrappuntistica and Elegien would be very welcome.
Colin Anderson
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Auf diesem Album:
Etüden op.16 Nr.1-6
+ Chopin-Variationen op.22
Etüde in Form einer Variation op.17
Pavane, DDD, 87
Daniel Blumenthal, Klavier
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Auf diesem Album:
4 Elegien
Sonatina seconda
Toccata
Bach-Busoni:
Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme
Toccata BWV 565
Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr
Claudius Tanski, Klavier
Kritik:
P. Cosse in FonoForum 11/92: «Tanskis zweite MDG-Platte wurde auf einem mit viel Liebe und Sorgfalt restaurierten Steinway aus dem Jahre 1901 eingespielt, dessen sehr persönlicher und geradezu unheimlich expansiver Klang in den klavierorchestralen Passagen der Bach-Transkriptionen ebenso sinngebend genutzt werden konnte wie in den pakkend vorgetragenen Komplikationen.»
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This disc of music for piano by Busoni is well titled The Visionary, contaning as it does the Seven Elegies of 1907 - the first of which the composer entitled "Nach der Wendung - Recuiellernent" (After the Turning - Resolution), dated the same year in which he published his Outline of a New Aesthetic. It is perhaps significant therefore that this disc is the first of a series or recordings of Busoni's piano music on which the present soloist is embarking.
Although Busoni himself averred "As a human being and an artist I prefer to look forward rather than backward" there is also a hint of nostalgia in the embodiment, in five of these strange pieces, of earlier material from previous important compositions - the Piano Concerto, Turandot, and Die Brautwahl. It is perhaps at the same time janus-headed - the third, the climax of the seven, was later used as introduction to the Fantasia Contrapuntistica. They contain 'the essence of myself' which he himself saw as the consummation ,at that point, of those musical ideas and thoughts to which he gave shape in the 'New Aesthetic'.
Coupled in this recording, significantly, is the Red Indian Diary - four studies on Red Indian motifs. It is often forgotten that Busoni held a professorship in Helsinki for some ten years, and there is a northern influence in his music, of which these four melodies are an example. Each reflects some visionary philosophy with which individual tribes are identified - one of the most poignant being the song of the Bluebird - a dance-song of the Pima Indians, as simple unwarlike people. It is noticeable that the inflexions of those melodies by which Busoni was so much affected can be heard at several points in the Elegies which follow.
The philosophical depths of these pieces, played with a fine regard for clarity and tempi by the American pianist jeni Slotchiver (here making her recording debut) are plumbed in the penetrating programme notes which she herself has written, and which augur well for future interpretations of this by no means easy music.
The disc ends with a beautifully shaped performance of the majestic Chaconne - which is the perfect summation of the Janus-aspect.
Colin Scott-Sutherland
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