Busoni And His Pupils
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BUSONI / BACH / BEETHOVEN / CHOPIN / LISZT
Busoni And His Pupils
Ferruccio Busoni, Egon Petri, Edward Weiss, Michael Zadora
[ Naxos Historical Great Pianists / CD ]
Release Date: Monday 4 October 2004
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BUSONI AND HIS PUPILS (1922-1952)
Ferruccio Busoni was one of the greatest pianists of his generation. What remains of his meagre recorded legacy are the published sides from the 1922 English Columbia sessions, as everything else was destroyed in a fire at the Columbia factory a few years later. If the most impressive performance on this disc is Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13 (Busoni gave a famous series of six piano recitals in Berlin of the music of Liszt), the Bach Chorale enables us to hear Busoni in one of his own arrangements, with extraordinary finger technique and control of tone. The Chopin Etudes, and particularly the Nocturne, amply demonstrate the 'iron intellectual discipline' that characterised Busoni's style of Chopin playing in the concert hall. A friend and colleague of Busoni, the now legendary pianist Egon Petri took the mantle of his master upon him after Busoni's death.
"Busoni was famously contemptuous of the recording process and his anguished letters on the subject at the time are reprinted here ("tired…ill…unprepared!"). In total only four English Columbias were published and all are collated here along with very rare recordings by Busoni's greatest pupil, Egon Petri, and by a much less well-known musician, his English pupil Rosamond Ley who left no commercial discs behind. Busoni's recorded pianism has occasioned considerable, frequently negative, comment over the years and has occasionally disconcerted even his greatest admirers in its neutrality towards the romantic repertoire. In all Busoni bequeathed less than half an hour's recorded music making to posterity - it's known that he made discs of others works, the hyphenated Mozart-Busoni Andantino, Gounod-Liszt Faust Waltz, Liszt's Petrarch Sonnet, the Paganini-Liszt Etude No 5, Valse Oubliée and Weber's Perpetuum Mobile, but these were all rejected for publication." MusicWeb
