When Busoni was bringing his performing career toward a close to concentrate on composing and teaching he arranged many works for two pianos to provide opportunities for him to play with a fellow pianist. These are some of them, recorded at Yale University in 1995. Don’t know why it took 17 years to bring them to a CD – perhaps waiting until 80 minutes could be crammed onto a CD to hold the entire concert? Several are world premiere recordings. The notes are interesting, relating the tale of what versatile musician Revenaugh went thru trying to find his second pianist and mounting the performances and recordings.
The Fantasia Contrappuntistica is the major work in the program. It exists in both a solo version (which has been recorded by John Ogdon and Geoffrey Douglas Madge) and in a two-piano version. The work came about after Busoni had announced that he was going to finish Bach’s final unfinished fugue in Art of the Fugue, and that the piece would be “between a composition of Cesar Franck and Beethoven’s Hammerklavier.” Busoni worked and reworked the piece in both version – the two-piano being considered the best. He ended up with a gigantic two-piano sonata full of heavy counterpoint around variations on a Bach chorale. The harmonies are of course those heard only a century after Bach’s death.
Busoni liked to transcribe Mozart almost as much as Bach, and three of his efforts are on the program. The Duettino comes from the finale of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 19, and the Berceuse was both a solo piano as well as orchestral work before it became a two-piano vehicle. Smith is a well-known conductor but originally trained as a piano soloist and holds up his end of the two-piano program very well. (He might be remembered as the first American conductor to record with a Russian orchestra, in the 1987 Moscow Philharmonic set on Sheffield Labs.) Sonics are excellent. I’ll listen to almost anything performed on two pianos, but this is an exceptional program and recording!
– John Sunier
