Ferruccio Busoni was an odd bird; though adored as a pianist, his music has always been seen from the vantage point of a semi-closed eye looking askance. He was a profound metaphysicist, venturing to include both the scientific and the mystical in his creations, often long-winded and exceptional diffuse. But he was also greatly in love with some of the older masters, particularly Bach, and loved the challenge posed by transcriptions. Many of these are his most famous works (one only thinks of the wonderful reworking of Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin for the piano). Liszt’s works also served as a sort of regenerate inspiration for the younger Busoni, who found in them a wealth of material just crying for further amplification.
Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on the Chorale ‘Ad no, ad salutarem undam’ is a work that takes its main theme from the chorale of the Anabaptists from Meyerbeer’s Le prophete, so it is in essence a redoing of a redoing. Saint-Saens called the original work “the most extraordinary organ work in existence” and Busoni’s version certainly keeps the bombast and ferocious colors intact; at the same time there is an added degree of clarity to a composer who could often lose himself in the wonderful world of sound for sound’s sake. This will not convert you from the Liszt original, but it will certainly add to the understanding of this monumental and yet oddly-conceived piece.
The Mozart Andantino is from the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 9, and the resulting transformation is something that really does partake of different worlds simultaneously. If Mozart’s original is a pristine vine, then Busoni certainly adds a lot of flowers in this fine nine-minute filler. But the gem here is of course the until-now John-Ogdon-owned Fantasia contrappuntistica, a work based on Bach’s monumental Art of Fugue, the final and incomplete Contrapunctus XIV. It is a four-subject fugue, something almost impossible to manage, and just at the point when the ‘B-A-C-H’ theme comes together the composer, according to son C.P.E., died. Busoni is having none of that, and completes the work in his own fashion by changing the effort into an immense mélange of harmonic and contrapuntally related subjects, each pursued independently while woven into a chromatic tapestry of amazing complexity. It is rough going in spots—not particularly moving—but at the same time so magisterial as to engage the brain in ways music does not normally do. It has to be heard to be believed, and one can come to love it.
Hamish Milnes does yeoman’s work here in a monster program, with excellent sound supplied by Hyperion, along with equally enlightening notes. For the brave and unfulfilled.
— Steven Ritter
