Busoni recommendations please...

[ahinton]

I'll second Doktor Faust, the DG recording conducted by Leitner is a classic. The Bach-Busoni piano transcriptions are well worth hearing, there is a Hyperion disc of them played by Nikolai Demidenko which has some quite hair-raising piano playing. I also have a 2 CD set of Late Piano Music played by Marc-Andre Hamelin; cant recall anything about it, but it ought to be worth investigating. Likewise a 2 CD set of the short operas (or "theatrical caprice" and "Chinese fable") Arlecchino and Turandot, conducted by Kent Nagano. I must have played them and cant remember a note, but given how impressive Doktor Faust is, they must be worth trying.

A 2-CD set by Hamelin? I think that you must have been sold a faulty product, as it has 3 CDs! Calling it the Late Piano Music's rather odd given how many years of Busoni's creativity that it covers - and even more so since there's no Fantasia Contrappuntistica in the solo version - but much to recommend this set (apart, I fear, from the Fantasia after J S Bach which pales into insignificance before Ogdon's recording of it on the Altarus 2-CD set In Memoriam John Ogdon 1937-1989 (on which is also to be found an organ recital by Kevin Bowyer in Ogdon's memory comprising the Busoni authority Ronald Stevenson's Prelude and Fugue on a theme of Liszt, Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica [in the organ version by Middelschulte] and another piece commissioned by the organist especially for it, Kevin Bowyer).

In addition to the Schiller/Humphreys 2-piano version of Fantasia Contrappuntistica, there's one by Stevenson and Banowetz, also on Altarus, that's well worth getting.

Busoni's piano concerto isn't often played, even these days, largely because of its size and the forces required for it, but it's anything but "tosh"(!) and it has been recorded quite few times now; a pity that none of these recordings is by Carlo Grante, a great Busoni exponent whom I heard perform it in Rome several year ago Yes, Ogdon's recording is unsurpassable although some of the orchestral playing on it leaves rather much to be desired; in that particular respect, Hamelin's is much better (and it's conducted by Elder, who was already well familiar with the work having conducted it with Donohoe many years earlier, just as, curiously, Fabio Luisi, who conducted the Grante performance I attended, had also performed, though not recorded, it with Hamelin.

The Toccata for piano is a must, as are the seven Elegies and six Sonatinas for piano. There's also a violin concerto, on a much smaller scale and of less substance than the piano concerto but still well worth getting to know. Then there's Berceuse Élégiaque, Nocturne Symphonique...

Curiously, I once attended a recital in London many years ago by Ricci and Ogdon in which I understood they were supposed (according to advance publicity) to play Busoni's "Violin Sonata in E minor", a great favourite of mine written at around the time of the composer's piano concerto; when they began to play, I couldn't understand what on earth was going on until I looked down at the programme booklet to find that they were playing his first, not his second, violin sonata (and those who know will realise that they're both in the same key and I knew nothing of that first one at the time!).

All four operas are well worth getting to know and although the first, Die Brautwahl, is perhaps rather too long for its own good, much from it turns up as the opening of his much later piano Toccata; as already mentioned, Barenboim's the man for this...

The problem with the unfinished ending of Doktor Faust is which completion to use; Jarnach's is undoubtedly flawed, Beaumont's has more going for it and there have been two by Stevenson, neither of which has yet seen the light of day - and there's another by Larry Sitsky which looks to be impressive but which I have yet to hear.

OK, it's high time I shut up, dismounted from this particular one of the hobby-horses in my stable and gave someone else a word in edgeways!...

[umslopogaas]

Well, of course if you dont like it I wont argue, but tosh? Ogdon thought highly enough of it to learn it, which must have been no small job, and EMI thought highly enough of it to record it, two full price LPs and a generous booklet. I dont think either Ogdon or EMI would have lavished that much trouble on something if they thought it was tosh.

[ahinton]

Well, of course if you dont like it I wont argue, but tosh? Ogdon thought highly enough of it to learn it, which must have been no small job, and EMI thought highly enough of it to record it, two full price LPs and a generous booklet. I dont think either Ogdon or EMI would have lavished that much trouble on something if they thought it was tosh.

Quite - and, as it happens, EMI issued it twice - once with Ogdon and once with Donohoe; curiously, I have heard that Donohoe has said that he would never miss an opportunity to perform the concerto and Hamelin has said the same thing to me about it. He also said that he found the first pages of the work, up to the piano's first entry, to contain some of the most beautifal pages in Busoni's entire output and that he was relishing listening to them so much when giving what I believe was the work's Japanese première some years ago that he had to pull himself out of his rêverie prtty dam' sharpish and apparently split the opening octave C in that big entry!...

[umslopogaas]

My mistake ahinton, yes, the Hamelin set has three CDs.

I saw Doktor Faust at the ENO in 1986. According to the programme, which I still have, they used the version by Antony Beaumont, in an English translation by Edward J. Dent. The programme notes are something of a cultural marathon, taking in Leonardo, Descartes, Marie Curie, Erich Heller, George Bernard Shaw, Peter Medawar, C.J. Jung and Adrian Leverkuhn from Thomas Mann's 'Dr Faustus'. That's quite a line up! Faust was sung by Thomas Allen and Mephistopheles by Graham Clark.

[BBMmk2]

Another Hyperion release, is his Piano Concerto, with marc-Andre Hamlin. I have John Ogdon's version as well, which is very good, but I think the Hyperion was the better one.

[ahinton]

Another Hyperion release, is his Piano Concerto, with marc-Andre Hamlin. I have John Ogdon's version as well, which is very good, but I think the Hyperion was the better one.

As I mentioned conducted by Mark Elder who already knew the work through his much earlier recording with Peter Donohoe; much as John Ogdon is peerless in this, the orchestral playing on the Hamelin is much better - and in that crazy extended "chopsticks-like" piano passage in the profoundly moving central Pezzo Serioso, you can hear pretty much every note that Hamelin plays.