This is the second
volume in Jeni Slotchiver’s Busoni series
(see Busoni
the Visionary). Before I begin I
should mention her outstanding booklet
notes, which read as well as they delve
widely, and are a model of their kind.
That shouldn’t be altogether surprising
since she has devoted a great deal of
her musical energies into propagating
Busoni and in the first volume of this
series she served notice of her credentials.
Here she presents the
six Sonatinas and the Bach-Busoni Toccata
in C major. It’s certainly not the first
time that the six have been presented
in this way – Roland Pöntinen has
done it for CPO for instance - and it
does make, given the nature of the works,
for wide-ranging listening. If we concentrate
on three of them, the Third, the Fourth
and the Sixth we can appreciate the
level of Slotchiver’s involvement and
immersion in Busonian rhetoric. The
Third has considerable lyricism and
simplicity in her hands; she tends to
be more ruminative and less draconian
than a Busoni student such as Michael
von Zadora for instance, to take one
historical example; the same is true,
though to a considerably lesser extent
when it comes to Petri’s 1938 recording
but von Zadora is nearly two minutes
faster than Slotchiver’s 7.23. I particularly
admired the graceful seriousness of
her way with the fugal section.
The level of introspection,
bell tolls and the strong internal contrasts
are all brought out in the Fourth. Clarity
is paramount here as is the quality
of "veil" and a sense of mysterious
interiority. Zadora is considerably
more incisive and less inclined to highlight
lyricism and maintains his average of
stripping two minutes off Slotchiver’s
timing. In the Carmen Sixth,
where Zadora and Petri almost agree
on a tempo, we find that what Sorabji
called the sense of transformation is
most abruptly conjured by the more incisive
performances. Zadora is certainly a
supercharged presence – sometimes uncomfortably
so – but Petri brings out the chorale
implications better than anyone. Here
Slotchiver takes a rather leisurely
nine minutes or so (contrast Petri’s
6.31). The Toccata is convincingly though
maybe not magisterially conveyed but
it does round off the disc with understandable
grandeur.
The sound is very slightly
cramped in the American Academy of Arts
and Letters in New York City but it
doesn’t seriously impair enjoyment of
an authoritative series of performances.
There will be those who perhaps find
her too circumspect and at pains to
stress the more horizontal aspects of
Busoni’s writing but the element of
melancholy she evokes is certainly true
to Busonian emotional topography.
Jonathan Woolf
Jeni Slotchiver (piano) 
