Kirill Gerstein: My Busoni Top Five
In an exclusive IDAGIO playlist, pianist Kirill Gerstein shares his favourite recordings featuring the music of and performances by Ferruccio Busoni, a towering figure of fin-de-siècle musical life.
Read more…Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13 – Ferruccio Busoni
Busoni said the phonograph was "the devilish invention but without the devilish spirit", and he had his doubts about the idea of going to the recording studio. But the half-an-hour of acoustic piano recordings we have of him are some of the best examples of piano playing ever, despite the surface noise, which I think one gets accustomed to very quickly. 'Doctor Faust', of course, is Busoni's magnum opus and what I find very special about his recording of Liszt's 13th Rhapsody is that to me it’s not a real version of the Rhapsody: it’s more like a mirage, a kind of Mephistophelean illusion. The reports of Busoni’s playing say that it had the kind of ethereal, mystical quality of visions. With this performance it's as if you have this apparition of a gypsy band the palm of his hand, and then he blows the smoke and it dissipates leaving a landscape. Despite the age of the recording, it has that visionary and mystical, magical quality, and the piano turns from this thing made out of wood and metal into this thing of smoke and mirrors.
Busoni: Fantasia contrappuntistica for 2 Pianos – Sir András Schiff, Peter Serkin
On purpose I’m not including any Bach-Busoni, which is how people mostly know Busoni’s name, but obviously an involvement with Bach was absolutely essential to Busoni’s music-making in every way. He was really one of the pre-eminent keyboard scholas of Bach’s music of his time, and in the 'Fantasia contrpuntistica' he sort of performs a "mind meld" (to use the 'Star Trek' vocabulary!) with Bach, where he takes the unfinished fugue from the ‘Art of the Fugue’ and completes it. That's a daunting task already, but then he writes completely original material and arranges some of Bach’s material around it. The majority of musicians who know something about something admire Busoni. He’s an undisputable towering figure for us. And both András Schiff and Peter Serkin respond to that here, as well as bringing their expertise as wonderful Bach players to it.
Busoni: Sarabande and Cortège from 'Doktor Faust' – Kölner Runfunk-Sinfonieorchester, Carlo Maria Giulini
I wanted to include the Sarabande and Cortège from 'Doctor Faust' so that we have something from his magnum opus. The last years of his life were spent accumulating musical material for this piece, he wrote the libretto himself and had internationally one of the largest collections of 'Faust' editions – many works in many languages. And the Sarabande and Cortège again it shows that, though he’s writing an opera in the 1920s, there's a kind of chapeau to the old forms, to show that they could contain new ideas, which is also very much Brahms’s idea. And I think Giulini’s recording conveys something of all these things that Busoni was drawn to: this mysterious, magical, fairy tale-like quality. This mystical, esoteric atmosphere is not easy to capture in a recording, but I think this one does it best.
Busoni: Violin Sonata No. 2 – Josef Szigeti, Mieczysław Horszowski
What’s particularly interesting about the Second Violin Sonata is that it also contains a lot of Bach influences and, in fact, even variations on a Bach chorale. But it's the earliest piece of Busoni's I've selected and, though the involvement with Bach stays, the way it’s expressed and happens changes across his output. I chose the Szigeti recording instead of some of the more modern ones because Szigeti in fact studied with Busoni; or, rather, he was a disciple of Busoni’s and said that this shaped his musical outlook profoundly. In comparison with some other older violinists – Kreisler or Heifetz, for example – Szigeti’s already playing in a way that to our ears is quite modern. You listen to his Beethoven sonatas or his Mozart and you hear the clarity, the respect of the text, a very architectural view of music that doesn’t age.
Busoni: Piano Concerto – John Ogdon, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Daniell Revenaugh
Much too much has been given to the cheapest, most journalistic way of presenting Busoni's Piano Concerto: as the “monster” concerto, the longest, the one with chorus, etc. So there’s this awareness of the piece, but as a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster. But it’s symphonic, Mahler-like, and the interesting thing is that all the important musical events and processes are in the orchestra. The piano is in the role of a commentator – clearly Busoni himself – commenting on the proceedings. It’s very opulent, it’s very grand, but it’s not relentless piano-banging. It’s not per se a virtuoso display vehicle, more perhaps that it has the most difficult piano obbligato part in the world. That’s why for my recording it was so important to have Sakari Oramo, who I think a truly symphonic conductor with an affinity to this piece, and the Boston Symphony, which is a great orchestra. Here I've gone for the John Ogdon, though, which remains the best of its period. So then we do the Ogdon.
Bonus Track – Busoni: Zigeunerlied op 55/2 – Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Karl Engel
For my bonus track I've chose Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing one of the Goethe songs, the 'Zigeuner Lied'. It's a live performance and quite good. It’s also just a couple of minutes long, so a nice bonus!
[Interview by Hugo Shirley]