Busoni: Turandot: Concert Suite / Two Studies for Doctor Faust / etc

"A Chinese orchestra for Busoni's 1905 Turandot Suite, with its authentic Chinese melodies, seems a rather good idea. And the HK Philharmonic under Samuel Wong brings out the barbaric colouring, the harsh ceremonial of Busoni's highly individual take on Gozzi's play (20 years before Puccini) better than any performance I've heard. Instrumental detail is sinisterly pointed with obvious relish (hear the baleful brass at the start of the 'Night Waltz'), helped rather than hindered by a very close recording...

I wondered if the elusive crepuscular atmosphere of the Berceuse and the Sarabande and Cortege would survive similar treatment. But these prove to be performances of extraordinary intensity (on that count, superior to Neeme Jarvi's recent Chandos CD, which has no sharp edges), and the close-miked quality spotlights the sheer genius of Buson's orchestrations. Wong gives us by far the slowest Berceuse elegiaque on disc, liberally reinterpreting Busoni's Andantino marking but digging deep into the score's bottomless reserves of cataleptic melancholia. I very much hope, as with Jarvi's Chandos disc, that this is the first instalment of a Busoni series"
-- Calum Macdonald, BBC Music Magazine

"The newly appointed director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic is such an interesting artist...The Turandot Suite and the musicality of Joseph Wong would draw me to the Naxos [recording]."
- Michael Oliver, Gramophone July 2002. EDITOR'S CHOICE

Dante Michelangeli Benvenuto Ferruccio Busoni was born at Empoli, near Florence, in 1866, the only child of an Italian clarinettist father and a pianist mother of German paternal ancestry. He made his debut as a pianist in Trieste in 1874, going to Vienna for study and performance the following year. On the advice of Brahms he moved to Berlin in 1886, studying with Carl Reinecke, before teaching spells at the conservatories in Helsinki and Moscow.

Performance occupied much of his attention until the turn of the new century, when composition began to assume a new importance, though never dominance, in his career. Apart from a period in Zurich during the First World War, he lived in Berlin from 1894 until his death.

The essence of Busoni's music lies in its synthesis of his Italian and German ancestry: emotion and intellect; the imaginative and the systematic. Despite acclaim from composer and performer colleagues, his music remained the preserve of an informed few. Neither inherently conservative nor aggressively radical, his harmonic and tonal innovations were bound up with an essentially re-creative approach to the musical past which has only gained wider currency in recent decades.