Lebrecht Weekly | Busoni’s Centenary: Recordings of Piano Works and Doctor Faust

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What’s the point in having a centenary if it doesn’t restore a reputation? A hundred years have passed since the German-Italian Busoni died in Berlin and, while we’ve heard his massive piano concerto in concerthalls during 1924, nothing much else has happened to change the general perception that Busoni was a formidable pianist with great ideas that did not necessarily translate into music of lasting value.

Two albums of piano works reinforce that image. The German pianist Wolf Harden has reached volume 13 in his Naxos trawl of the complete works. While awed by his persistence and dedication, I find little of staggering originality in this one-paced selection. At a certain point, I am inclined to endorse a cynical observation that Busoni is only at his best when decorating works by Bach and Beethoven.

There is more variety in a Chandos piano album, played by Busoni fan-boys Peter Donohoe and Karl Lutchmayer. The tracklist opens with the famous Bach Toccata and Fugue that Vladimir Horowitz used to play as an encore. It then offers more fugues and variations, one on a theme by Chopin, which is curious if not compelling. The big blast here is the Fantasia contrappuntistica on a Bach chorale, reduced to four hands and loud enough to shatter a Meissen tea-set. Revised at the end of Busoni’s life, it hints heavily at the atonalities of 1920s Berlin.

Naxos have also issued a Florence recreation of Busoni’s opera, Doctor Faust. It’s a magniloquent enterprise, full of intriguing orchestral music and declamatory arias. I have seen it twice on stage, more bored than awed. A record allows me to dip in and out between the German recitative longueurs.

Busoni stands out as a towering figure in musical-intellectual evolution in central Europe, the only concert soloist whom Gustav Mahler respected. The best of him is found in the piano concerto and in the Berceuse that Mahler conducted in New York, in what was to be his own last concert. At the end of his centenary year Busoni lives on, larger than his music.

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