BUSONI : Piano Music • 1 (Wolf Harden) 2001 / Mp3

BUSONI : Piano Music • 2 (Wolf Harden) 2001 /Mp3

BUSONI : Piano Music • 3 (Wolf Harden) 2007 / Mp3

The music of Ferruccio Busoni was comparatively neglected for many decades, perhaps because he didn't fit any of the "-isms" that were contending to be the main line of musical development. There was too much Liszt in his music for him to be part of the neo-Classical crowd. Now that it's clear that that effort was itself a big part of classical music's problems, Busoni is showing up on more programs and recordings. He wrote tonal music, which for some disqualified him right off the bat. And there was a dry, rigorous quality even to his slightest compositions that placed him far from late Romanticism. Annotator Richard Whitehouse puts it nicely here when he writes that Busoni was "neither inherently conservative nor demonstratively radical," and that his innovations "were bound up with a re-creative approach to the musical past that has only gained wider currency over recent decades." In a way, John Adams is one of his heirs.
This disc, part of a series of Naxos releases covering all of Busoni's piano music, introduces some of Busoni's diverse impulses, all of them tied together by his devotion to contrapuntal art and artifice. There is a relatively straight Bach transcription; a set of Three Pieces, Op. 4-6, that use concise scherzo, prelude, and fugue forms; five virtuoso works Busoni called Ballet Scenes; some light waltz music intended as a tribute to Strauss but actually closer to Ravel's La valse (though not so grim); and finally an Indianische Tagebuch (Indian Diary) that is entirely different in effect from so-called Indianist compositions in the U.S. Hear the second part, "Song of Victory" (track 14), which uses an ostinato as the basis for the subtle motivic evolution present in many of Busoni's pieces. The Fourth Ballet Scene in the Form of a Concert Waltz, Op. 33a, is a good introduction to Busoni in general, with neither its waltz opening nor its thunderous conclusion ever really letting the listener sit back and relax -- there's always too much going on at the local level. German pianist Wolf Harden has the equipment to handle the pianistically thorny passages, with a powerful, bass-heavy sound, and he had a fine feel for the unique mixture of intellect and showmanship in Busoni that is sounding better and better every year. A good choice as part of the Naxos set or for anyone curious about this composer.  by James Manheim  

BUSONI : Piano Music • 4 (Wolf Harden) 2008 / Mp3

In the fourth volume of his cycle of Busoni's piano music for Naxos, pianist Wolf Harden tackles some of the most important pieces in Busoni's solo repertoire; the Six Elegies, the Toccata: Preludio -- Fantasia -- Ciaccona, and the Fantasia nach J.S. Bach. Harden fills out the program with appropriate, contextually related choices; the Bach/Busoni Prelude and Fugue in D, BWV 532, originally for organ, and the seldom recorded piano solo version of the Berceuse Elegiaque, subtitled by Busoni as "Elegy No. 7." One would expect in such emotionally wrought Busoni -- the Berceuse is a memorial to his mother, as is the Fantasia to his father -- that Harden would be firing on all cylinders here. In a technical sense, he is; the execution aspect of the whole disc is impressive apart from a transition or two that come off as abrupt. However, Harden takes the Elegies a shade faster than most, and the underlying dance rhythms -- usually muted owing to slower tempi -- become the detail that plays to the foreground. In making such tempo choices, Harden's Elegies come off as being rather strident and he loses the sense of shrouded mystery that these pieces are normally associated with, and that doesn't seem like an appropriate trade-off. This may be the result of a conceptual misunderstanding; though Busoni was a pioneer of neo-classical thinking in music, the Elegies in particular are closer to the realm of Liszt than they are of Prokofiev. In any event, it is somehow encouraging that twenty first century pianists are able to take piano pieces once thought barely possible and perform them in a manner that's almost blasé. In this matter, a bit more give would've yielded expressive results in this music, such as is customary, but one cannot fault Harden for playing such extraordinarily difficult piano music with such proficiency, it's just an additional flair for drama, mood, and suspense that is lacking. by Uncle Dave Lewis  

BUSONI : Piano Music • 5 (Wolf Harden) 2009 / Mp3

Wolf Harden returns to Busoni for Naxos in this, his fifth volume of Busoni's piano music for the label, and Harden seems to be more on his game here than in the fourth volume. While flanked by Busoni's familiar transcription of J.S. Bach's "St. Anne" prelude and his extraordinary 1922 rewrite of his much earlier Variations on Chopin's C minor Prelude, the real jewels in this crown are a couple of obscure suites, the Six Etudes, Op. 16 (1883), and the Six Pieces, Op. 33b (1895-1896). The first set is a wild and wooly series of etudes Busoni composed when he was only 17 years of age, and it contains so many seeds of his mature style that certain pieces -- such as the fifth etude "Fuga" -- could nearly be mistaken for the Busoni of 30 or so years later. The Six Pieces date from just before the Violin Concerto and Violin Sonata No. 2, Op. 36a, which Busoni cited as representing a stylistic breakthrough for him. The virtuoso textures he achieves in these pieces -- "Frohsion" utilizes a sweeping figure Busoni returned to in the elegy entitled "Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu Dir" from the Sechs Elegien of 1907 -- are ones that he would revisit. The rest of it -- its comparatively conservative harmonic style and stern, seriously minded post-romantic posture -- are things Busoni would leave behind for good.
Harden is very sharp throughout this whole recording, even as his piano seems to have something of a hiccup here and there. In the Bach transcription and Chopin variations, Harden is entering the market with some already stiff competition afoot, for example Demidenko in the Bach and Kaoru Bingham in the Chopin. However, in the other works Harden is running practically unopposed, and while no "world premiere" is claimed for the Six Pieces Op. 33b, this does seem to be the first complete recording of that set, from which the "Fantasia in modo antico" is usually singled out and played as a separate entity. If Harden may feel the competition, he doesn't show it, as he treats all of the music here with the same level of respect and has obviously put a lot of hard work into this production. by Uncle Dave Lewis  

BUSONI : Piano Music • 6 (Wolf Harden) 2009 / Mp3

Naxos continues its edition, with pianist Wolf Harden, of Ferruccio Busoni's piano music, of which there is a lot, with most of it written at a very high level of difficulty and some invested in rather long pieces that require almost superhuman endurance. Volume six contains three rather uncommon pieces, starting with Busoni's piano transcription of Liszt's organ work Fantasy and Fugue on "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam," a piece recorded in part by Busoni's pupil Leo Sirota as early as the mid-'20s, but seldom visited since. Liszt created his own four-hand version of the piece that is far more frequently played over Busoni's solo piano edition. This is followed by Busoni's early Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 20a, composed in 1883 when Busoni was 17, a relative rarity hardly known before the 1980s. The Prélude et Etude en Arpèges (1923) is a very late Busoni composition and the best-known work on the program; it is a highly regarded piece that bears some kinship with his never-finished opera Doktor Faustus. All of these pieces are well worth hearing; as in the case of the Spanish Rhapsody, although it's technically a transcription of Liszt, no one would mistake the Fantasy and Fugue on "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam" for being Liszt because it has Busoni's special gestures and approach to piano technique all over it. Although Busoni rejected all of his pre-1893 works for what he felt was their precocity and lack of finish, as it turns out the F minor Piano Sonata is a fully mature and ambitious statement that is unusual for an Italian composer in the opera-obsessed 1880s and written in a time when the piano sonata itself was a form suffering from a brief eclipse.

The Naxos Busoni piano music edition has some strong advantages over other, similar projects; Busoni's piano music is so expansive and confusing that some editions have found ways to curtail the overall project in some way -- the Bach/Busoni or other kinds of transcriptions are left out, or made a different project on its own, or -- as Gunnar Johansen did on his Artist's Direct label in the 1960s -- limiting it only to fully original compositions. In Johansen's day, though, it was practically impossible to access the earlier Busoni works in manuscript that were extant; by the twenty-first century most of these efforts had found their way into print. Naxos' edition is pretty much all-inclusive of everything and combines works on individual volumes in an intelligent way; certainly the recordings are technically superior to anything that appeared on Artist's Direct. However, one genuinely wishes the label could have employed a pianist just a little more on the ball than Harden; it sounds like he is reading these scores, and it's a very good reading, but he often seems behind Busoni's music and there really isn't a strong interpretive sense at play in these renderings. To his credit, Johansen had his personal contact with Busoni to draw from and his passion for the project, so it's easy to forgive the bad sound and occasional finger slips here and there. Harden seems a bit lacking on the passion front and during the Prélude et Etude en Arpèges -- stated almost entirely in arpeggios -- we hear an arpeggio that has a note missing from it; Harden simply wasn't able to place his finger on the key at that moment. Naxos should have retaken it, but didn't; with Roland Pöntinen, Carlo Grante, and Ronald Stevenson already out there in this work, this recording simply doesn't have a competitive edge. by Uncle Dave Lewis  

BUSONI : Piano Music • 7 (Wolf Harden) 2010 / Mp3

BUSONI : Piano Music • 8 (Wolf Harden) 2013 / Mp3

BUSONI : Piano Music • 9 (Wolf Harden) 2017 / Mp3

BUSONI : Piano Music • 10 (Wolf Harden) 2018 / Mp3

BUSONI : Piano Music • 11 (Wolf Harden) 2019 / Mp3