L'alta Fantasia

Ever been curious to hear a musical setting of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? Well here's your chance. It's the second movement of Holst's First Choral Symphony (although he called it "First," there was never a second). You know the poem: "Beauty is truth and truth, beauty…." This is a highly enjoyable piece, and in sections of the first and third movement, the composer of The Planets makes some sounds that recall his most popular work. But there's much more to Holst than space music. He was a master at writing for chorus, his word setting always highly colorful and never stiff or "Victorian" sounding. This performance is the best available, so if you're intrigued, go for it.

After a first recital devoted to the Toccata, Andrea Buccarella, winner of the MA Festival competition in Bruges in 2018, now presents an album devoted to the Fantasia. This album follows the same anthological principles as the first and includes both Italian and German compositions from the origins of the genre in Venice at the beginning of the 17th century to its apogee in the following century with Johann Sebastian Bach.

John Ogdon was one of the great interpreters of Ferruccio Busoni's keyboard music in the first stage of its latter-day revival, and his EMI Angel recording of Busoni's Piano Concerto, Op. 39, can be said to have "made" that work as a viable, if impractical, concert staple. Between that triumph in 1967 and the recordings on Altarus' Busoni: Piano Works, made in 1988 – the last full year of Ogdon's short life – there were a host of detours and disappointments for the pianist. A nervous breakdown or two, long hospitalizations, longer absences from the concert stage, and a comeback received lukewarmly by critics were all hallmarks of a career that would have stopped lesser men cold.