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An aura of mystique
surrounds the name of Ferruccio Busoni
which is out of all proportion to the
surviving evidence of his playing, let
alone the tenuous hold his compositions
have on the repertoire. The latter have
their fervent admirers yet somehow not
one has ever quite "caught on".
His Bach arrangements were both the
making and the undoing of his reputation.
An American socialite lady, introduced
at a party to "Mr. Busoni",
shrieked with delight, "Oh say,
not the great Mr. Bach-Busoni!".
One is tempted to say it served him
right.
Our greatest evidence
of his formidable powers as a pianist
remains the numerous descriptions of
his concerts made by well-informed musicians
and, in common with most pianists of
that epoch, we are obliged to judge
him on the strength of short pieces
alone. In view of his fame one might
have expected more recordings to have
been made, and indeed more were. His
first sessions were in London in 1919.
He hated every minute of it and for
technical reasons none of the discs
were published. In 1922 he tried again
and on this occasion, too, more was
set down than could eventually be issued.
In many similar cases it has been possible,
at a distance of time, to recover rejected
takes of this kind, which usually remain
in the company archives; they would
undoubtedly have filled out the picture
a little, whatever their defects, but
alas, they were destroyed in a fire
at the Columbia factory in the early
1920s, so the published sides are all
we have. In spite of Busoni’s unease
with the recording process his love
of Bach led him to offer to record the
48 Preludes and Fugues complete, but
the idea was rejected. I should add
that I am relying heavily on Jonathan
Summers’ excellent note for all this
information.
Various transfers have
been made over the years of this small
clutch of Busoni recordings, and most
have similarly had the idea of filling
out the CD with performances by some
of Busoni’s pupils. I imagine it is
safe to say that none have been cheaper
than Naxos’s and, while I don’t have
any others to hand, I really can’t imagine
recordings of this vintage ever sounding
any better. So for a modest price we
can glean at least some idea of his
powers and it is at any rate clear that
he had a warm, limpid, rounded and somehow
noble tone, effortlessly brilliant fingers
and a general lack of ostentation. Obviously
these old recordings treat his forte
passages less kindly.
The Bach Prelude is
taken fairly swiftly and flowingly until
a point about three quarters through
(b.23) where he suddenly decides to
bring out the surprisingly elliptical
harmonic process (this was the bar which
so disturbed Gounod that he substituted
it with two bars of his own in his infamous
"Ave Maria") with a strong
accent in the bass and a drastic slowing
down. From here to the end he indulges
in various pieces of rhetorical point-making
which sound very odd (and frankly unmotivated)
today. The Fugue begins gently and with
luminous textures, but at times it slows
down for no apparent reason. The very
large rallentando in the middle may
be classed as an exaggeration rather
than a distortion since the fugue does
actually divide into two sections (something
which is perfectly obvious to the listener
without pointing it out in this way)
but the equally great rallentando towards
the end is surely heinous, for while
three voices are cadencing a fourth
is trying to enter with the theme and
gets left stranded.
The Chorale-Prelude
goes at an extremely vivacious tempo
which shows off Busoni’s clean fingers
but makes nonsense of the music. The
16th-notes here have a melodic
value, they are not just a meaningless
wash of sound, and whatever would a
tempo like this sound like on the original
instrument, the organ, in a church acoustic?
Having played the piece through very
lightly and, in its way, delightfully,
he evidently found it too short (which
it wouldn’t have been at a proper tempo)
so he repeats the second part (no repeat
is marked) building it up as a crescendo
and rounding off with a few forte bars
of his own.
The Beethoven Ecossaises
are taken at a lick which reduces these
charming miniatures – which Beethoven
specified should be played "nicht
zu schnell", "not too fast"
– to mere gabble, but the Chopin Nocturne
is to be taken very seriously indeed.
In this piece at least I cannot agree
with the London critic who wrote in
1919, expressing a commonly held view,
that "he submits Chopin to an iron
intellectual discipline, eliminating
every hint of waywardness, of improvisation,
of tenderness". True, it is somewhat
slow and almost Beethovenian in its
gravity, but it is also deeply felt,
beautifully sung and the fioriture
sound very improvisatory to me.
The Prelude is more
questionable, taken unusually fast and
almost skittishly. He then plays it
a second time, somewhat more strongly,
after which he uses a phrase from it
to improvise a link to the "Black
Key" Study, which provides a beautiful
cascade of light sounds. For some reason
he recorded this Study again separately,
a shade more deliberately on the first
page but thereafter almost identical.
The E minor Study is quite weird, beginning
very slowly and flapping around like
a drunk grasshopper. As a result the
middle section, which Chopin indicated
is to be played slower, has to be played
faster, proving that the tempi
for the outer sections must be wrong.
The Liszt is the nearest
we have to a large scale piece and it
is an impressively musical performance.
Though Busoni does not hold back when
barnstorming is inevitable, he seeks
out the music’s delicacy wherever possible,
perhaps even too much so; more recently
Brendel has shown that it is possible
to treat these Rhapsodies musically
without curtailing their gipsy spirit.
Still, this and the Nocturne do at least
give us some inkling of Busoni’s powers.
In view of the master’s
own waywardness it is interesting that
the common factor between the three
pupils who fill up the disc is a straightforward,
unexaggerated approach, together with
a realisation of the gravity which lies
at the root of Busoni’s music, even
in an apparent showpiece like the Carmen
Fantasy.
That said, the three
seem to have been arranged in decreasing
order of interest. Egon Petri is the
best-known, of course, and a commanding
figure in his own right. The fierceness
of the 1945 New York recording does
not present his forcefully direct performance
of the Chaconne in its most favourable
light but the 1938 recordings fall more
easily on the ear. The Albumblatt is
a Bach-haunted piece with a strange
individuality all its own and the "Elegy"
actually builds into a bravura exploitation
of Neapolitan themes which yet maintains
a typically Busonian gravitas.
Michael von Zadora
shows less personality, but he also
has less interesting music to play;
the Sonatina no.3 would be rather low
on my list of pieces with which to persuade
the kiddies of the delights of classical
music and no.5 is dolefully un-Christmassy,
but he makes a dashing job of the Carmen
Fantasy. I doubt if Edward Weiss’s heavy-handed,
technically barely adequate, performances
enshrine any particular message for
future interpreters of his chosen pieces.
This is a case where a good modern pianist
would be far preferable and the recording
is overloaded and unpleasant.
One would like to go
to a disc like this and say "so
this is what it was all about";
as I have made it plain – and Jonathan
Summers’s notes are very honest about
the drawbacks of Busoni’s recorded legacy
– the surviving evidence just doesn’t
tell us all that much. But in view of
the aura surrounding Busoni’s name it
may still be worth satisfying your curiosity,
especially when it costs so little to
do so.
Christopher Howell
NAXOS 8.110777 [76:02] 