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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rarely Heard Two-Piano Music by Busoni, 4 Jan 2006
To the extent that piano music by Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) is known to the average music-lover, it is in the form of the fairly straightforward hyphenated piano arrangements of the music of other composers, e.g. Bach-Busoni. But he wrote a lot of original music and some of it was for two pianos. Here we have four such works, including the two-piano version of his pianistic masterpiece, the highly original and fascinating half-hour-long Fantasia Contrappuntistica. I had never heard this version before - I'm very familiar with the one-piano version - and must say that from its initial peremptory dotted-figure opening through to the end of the final stretta it commands the listener's attention. Part of the work is a set of variations based on Bach's chorale 'Allein Gott in der Höh'sei Ehr.' Typical of Busoni, he couldn't leave the original one-piano version alone -- it went through several versions and finally was arranged as here for two pianos, and then, thinking to make it the final movement of a gigantic two-piano sonata, he added three further movements, also heard here. Each of these pieces can be played as a stand-alone work, but the cumulative power of hearing the four pieces in succession is pretty impressive. On this CD, however, the Fantasia Contrappuntistica is Track 1, so if you want to hear the putative 'sonata' as Busoni considered presenting it, you must program your CD player to play tracks in the following order: 2 3 4 1. Track 2 contains the so-called 'Improvisation on the Bach Chorale "Wie wohl is mir, o Freund der Seele"', which in its original form had been part of a violin sonata. (See how complicated Busoni's oeuvre can get because of his penchant for changing his mind about the form various works should take?) Just as the outer movements of this 'sonata' are based on Bach's music, the two inner movements are based on themes by Mozart, another of Busoni's gods. Movement Two (Track 3) is entitled 'Fantasie für eine Orgelwalze', based on a trivial Mozart tune actually written for barrel organ, K. 608. It is, actually, a pretty weighty movement, and sounds more like the Busoni we're used to from his many hyphenated arrangements. This is followed by Movement Three (Track 4) called 'Duettino Concertante nach Mozart' which is based on the finale of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 19 in F Major, K. 459. It acts as the Scherzo (albeit in 2/4) of this putative sonata and is entirely winning. The two pianists here are Alan Schiller and John Humphreys, both British and neither of whom I'd heard of before. They apparently have been playing together for many years, although each has another career as a soloist and teacher. They certainly seem to have the sound of a duo who think and breathe together. (Their rapid-fire double-thirds trills and scales are breathtakingly synchronized.) Sound is clear and lifelike, if just a bit shallow. This is a marvelous exposition of rarely-heard music by an altogether under-appreciated 20th century composer. TT=58:01 Scott Morrison
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~ Johann Sebastian Bach
~ Alexander Scriabin
~ Domenico Scarlatti
~ Dietrich Buxtehude
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