Busoni Piano Concerto

Once a towering inspirational figure in the musical life of Berlin, later a crucial influence on musicians as diverse as Sibelius, Varèse, Schoenberg and Weill, Ferruccio Busoni is now being rediscovered by a new generation of performers and listeners.

The Busoni concerto, with its five movements, choral finale and a length of over 70 minutes, is surely the most grandiose ever written. But this is no over-ambitious monster; Busoni was one of the greatest pianists the world has known, but he was also a great intellectual with very strong views on art and culture. This work is the masterpiece of his middle years, more of a symphony in the breadth and scope of its ideas, but at the same time almost casually requiring the most formidable technical ability from the soloist. There is no doubt that this is one of music's major neglected masterpieces.

The Piano Concerto in C major, Op. 39 (BV 247), by Ferruccio Busoni, is one of the largest works ever written in this genre. The concerto lasts around 70 minutes and is in five movements; in the final movement a male chorus sings words from the final scene of the verse drama Aladdin by Adam Oehlenschläger, who also wrote the words of one of the Danish national anthems.

Busoni's fascinating, mammoth Piano Concerto no longer can claim to be the rarity it once was, when just about the only version available was John Odgon's not-really-as-great-as-its-reputation-would-lead-us-to-believe recording for EMI. For the performance that really is great, look no further. Dohnányi and Ohlssen play the spots off the work, rugged and impassioned in the opening two movements, thoughtfully intense in the long central Pezzo serioso, scintillating in the All'Italiana, and refreshingly cogent and truly "moderato" in a finale that never drags or sounds anti-climactic.

The massive piano concerto by Busoni with closing men’s chorus is the culminating work of his first period and sums up what he learned from the piano masters of the past, without venturing far down the more exploratory paths of his later work. It has never been widely performed, but has of late been surprisingly often recorded./quote]

For Volume 24 of 'The Romantic Piano Concerto' Hyperion went to Portugal to celebrate one of the country's greatest musical sons. José Vianna da Motta, if he is remembered at all, is primarily known as a very fine pianist. He was one of Liszt's last pupils, became a friend of Busoni, and left a small body of very impressive 78rpm recordings. After many years based in Berlin he returned to his country of birth as director of the Lisbon conservatory and became central to the musical life of the country. And like many other performers of the day, he also composed.

Hyperion’s record of the month for January presents, for the first time, the original version of Delius’s Piano Concerto. Two years after completing this work in 1904, Delius recast it, rejecting the third movement and reorganizing other material. Perhaps thinking that the solo part wasn’t sufficiently pianistic, Delius also consulted a friend, the Busoni pupil Theodor Szántó, who rewrote the piano part in virtuoso style (with Delius’s ultimate approval). It is the Szántó version that has, until now, always been performed. With Delius’s original, characteristically refined orchestration also restored (from the orchestral parts that survive from the first performance in 1904), we can now hear this work as the composer envisaged before the involvement of another hand.

Though barely remembered now, both Salomon Jadassohn and Felix Draeseke were major figures in German musical life in the second half of the 19th century. Both began their studies at the conservative Leipzig Conservatory but after independently encountering Liszt and his work at Weimar in the 1850s both became disciples of that composer and the New German School he established. Jadassohn subsequently returned to Leipzig where he composed and had a long and distinguished teaching career, his pupils including Delius, Grieg and Busoni, while Draeseke finally ended up in Dresden teaching at the Conservatory there.