Jeni Slotchiver is a graduate of Indiana University, a pupil of German Diez. She likes to play Busoni, so she bears a mantle borne by Dimitri Mitropoulos and Egon Petri. Slotchiver opens with Busoni’s 1915 Red Indian Diary, a suite of four movements which uses motifs Busoni had already employed in his Indian Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra. Busoni’s relationship with a former pupil, Natalie Curtis, bore fruit when she presented him with her Indians’ Book, a collection of Native American tunes, similar to what Bartok and Kodaly were doing in Hungary. All four are relatively spare works, the motives presented in small units, arpeggiated, modal, chordal by of suggesting a hymn that still manages to avoid singability. The last of the set, the Wabanakis Dance Song, approaches exultation, but it gets lost in its own harmonic labyrinths. In Busoni, simplicity is always at war with learned contrivance.
The 1907 Seven Elegies Busoni considered seminal in his opera, a kind of stripping down of his previously romantic style. They bear the inscription Angst und Glauben (Dread and Hope), a reaction to Mahler’s condemnation of the 20th Century as “an epoch of death.” The C Major piece that opens the set contests the tonic triad against a tritone, stability versus dissolution. This is an impulse we find in Debussy, but Busoni has to work harder to achieve mystification. The Al’Italia elegy is the most familiar, a turgid barcarolle rife with folk motifs, Neapolitan and Native American, of dubious tonality. The opposing runs in the hands look back to the Piano Concerto (1904) and herald Prokofiev’s G Minor Concerto. The middle section is a feria, a hint of saltarello. The third Elegy takes its cue from a Lutheran chorale we recognize in Bach, here undergoing ecstatic treatment in the Lisztian manner. The application of unresolved chords, unanswered questions, makes this piece kin with Charles Ives. We hear this musical tissue again in the monumental Fantasia Contrappuntistica. The fourth Elegy derives from Busoni’s opera Turandot, a combination of staccato etude and variants on Greensleeves. Slotchiver applies a light and rapturous hand, one that would like to land in G Major, but winds up in E Minor, hinting at Liszt‘s Spanish Rhapsody. A ghost-waltz for No. 5, more materials from Turandot that sound like an Alkan etude. Another Busoni opera, Die Brautwahl, provides a heart-beat motif for Busoni’s Manichean applications of light and dark for Elegy 6, A Vision. Ms. Slotchiver pedals hard in an attempt to make the hesitant motif achieve a glowing apotheosis. I would prefer she applied this effort to Liszt’s Vallee d’Obermann. A tender innocence pervades the Berceuse, a hazy requiem for the composer’s mother, Anna. Its closing page echoes Liszt’s Funerailles.
Finally, the Bach Chaconne, which we who love gothic horror films recall from The Beast With 5 Fingers with Peter Lorre. Busoni composed his augmented treatment of the violin partita movement around 1892. The trick is to sustain the line over the course of the variants without emotional as well as linear sag. I find some of Ms. Slotchiver’s progressions overly-cautious and precious, where a bolder approach might have rocked me. Still, she has the whole concept under her hands, and I tend to think that her performance ten years from now will yield profounder results.
— Gary Lemco
