- Piano Concerto (Busoni)
The
Piano Concerto in C major byFerruccio Busoni , Opus 39, is one of the largest works written in this particular genre. The work is in five movements, the last of which also utilizes a male chorus, to a text by Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger, a highly unusual feature for the piano concerto. The work was first performed inBerlin ,Germany onNovember 10 ,1904 , to decidedly mixed reviews. The century following its premiere have seen relatively few performances, owing to the large orchestration, complicated musical texture, the use of a male chorus, and the staggering demands put on the soloist.Notable performers of the concerto have included
John Ogdon ,Egon Petri (a student of Busoni's),Garrick Ohlsson andMarc-Andre Hamelin .Movements
The first movement, marked "Prologo e introito" is a little over fifteen minutes long on average, and is a broad Allegro movement which features a clangorous piano part.
The second movement, a kind of
Scherzo , is mostly a light-fingered affair for the piano that makes use of "Italianate" rhythms and melodic material, even if the melodies are more evocative ofItalian popular music than actual quotations from indigenousItalian folk music .The third and longest movement is the "Pezzo serioso", a massive meditation and exploration in four parts in the key of D flat major which has a central climax that is once again pianistically challenging and brilliantly scored for both the
piano and theorchestra .The fourth movement is perhaps the most variegated in its use of the orchestra, with a terrifically virtuosic piano part, arguably more difficult than anything that has come before it in the work. There are also two cadenzas to this movement - one, included in the printed score; the other, an insert in the two-piano score that is an amplification of the one printed in the two-piano edition.
The final movement, with male chorus, complete with a somewhat obscure text by Oehlenschlaeger, brings full circle many themes that have been heard earlier in the work.
Recordings
There are at least seven recordings of Busoni's Piano Concerto, Op. 39. The first studio recording was an Angel/EMI set by
John Ogdon andDaniell Revenaugh from the 1960s. (A pair of earlier recordings have surfaced in recent years, one byNoel Mewton-Wood , the other byGunnar Johansen .) The Ogdon recording was followed by those ofBoris Bloch withChristoph Eschenbach conducting. ThenVolker Banfield 's on theCPO label withLutz Herbig appeared;Garrick Ohlsson 's withChristoph von Dohnanyi followed suit very shortly thereafter, as didPeter Donohoe 's withMark Elder on Angel/EMI, a quarter century after Ogdon's, though it was recorded before Banfield's and Ohlsson's.These were followed by
Giovanni Battel 's andFrancois Joel Thiollier 's recordings, appearing the same year, alongsideViktoria Postnikova 's with her husbandGennadi Rozhdestvensky . Following this was a disc byDavid Lively andMichael Gielen . This was followed a number of years later by that ofMarc-Andre Hamelin (with a filmed performance of the fourth movement available on DVD coming a few years after).In 2003,
Somm Recordings released a performance from January 1948 byNoel Mewton-Wood with theBBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under SirThomas Beecham . Most recently, the amateur pianist, industrialist, and philanthropist SirErnest Hall made a recording available only through his website.Marc-Andre Hamelin's performance with
Osmo Vänskä and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra was broadcast onMTV3 , a Swedish commercial television station, complete.A number of other recordings are in early stages of planning as of December 2006. Other performances by
Kun Woo Paik ,Randall Hodgkinson ,Martin Jones , andJanos Solyom have received some notice in the past few years.External links
*
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.