Busoni Piano Concerto with Kirill Gerstein, Sakari Oramo with Berlin Philharmoniker
Broadcast October 19, 2024
Busoni Piano Concerto with Kirill Gerstein, Sakari Oramo with Berlin Philharmoniker
Berliner Philharmoniker
Sakari Oramo, conductor
Kirill Gerstein, piano
Men of the Rundfunkchor Berlin
Ladies of the Rundfunkchor Berlin
Gijs Leenaars, chorus master
Claude Debussy, Nocturnes (with Ladies of the Rundfunkchor Berlin)
Nuages
Fêtes
Sirènes
Ferruccio Busoni, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with Male Choir in C major, op. 39
Prologo e introito. Allegro dolce e solenne
Pezzo giocoso
Pezzo serioso:
Introductio. Andante sostenuto
Prima pars. Andante quasi adagio
Altera pars. Sommessamente
Ultima pars. A tempo
All' italiana. Tarantella vivace in un tempo
Cantico. Largamente (with chorus)
In this centenary year of Ferruccio Busoni’s death, the clouds obscuring our perception of his music are finally beginning to part. It is becoming progressively clear that the mystical German-Italian virtuoso-teacher-theorist’s most enduring work is his relatively early piano concerto. Busoni’s oeuvre always betrayed a conflict between his Italian extroversion and his German intellectualism. The later works lurk in a certain somber musical language that glistens as the deepest sea creatures in their umbral world. Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica and his unfinished opera Doktor Faust were considered his greatest utterances: serious, meditative, and contrapuntal. The piano concerto, however, displays a sunnier, wittier exuberance, and flexes the muscle of hyper-virtuosity. Since the 1960s, more performances of his Opus 39 have emerged from live performances and from studio renderings than any of the composer’s more recondite masterworks.
Amongst Busoni’s musical idols, J. S. Bach loomed the highest. Strict counterpoint and chorale-based compositions became immersions for Busoni. Not only did he create original Neo-Baroque works, but he also transcribed many of Bach’s works for piano. Liszt was another idol: richly virtuosic and reflective chromaticism balanced his contrapuntal forms. Busoni also admired Mozart’s formal elegance, melodic charm, and clarity, which helped balance his weightier indulgences. Exploring models for a piano concerto, he attempted to merge Mozart’s penchant for symmetry with Beethoven’s muscular orchestration and musical rhetoric. Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy for piano, choir, and orchestra could have been influential in the plan for his concerto. Finally, a fascination with Goethe and orientalism drew Busoni to Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger, the Danish poet and author of the play Aladdin (1805). By the time he was composing his piano concerto, Busoni had considered writing a musical drama based on the play. All these influences, in addition to ancient Egyptian symbology, Italian folk music, and a Wagnerian-inspired use of motifs, created an overabundance of material. The wild fourth movement appears, in part, in his later Elegies for piano.
Busoni’s Piano Concerto breaks all previous boundaries of the genre. This seventy-minute, five-movement giant includes instructions to play the piece attacca, meaning without pause between movements. Still the most daunting of virtuoso works, the concerto provided a summation of Busoni’s gift as a symphonist, keyboard wizard, theorist, and philosopher of a new era. Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni’s portrait of the master captures the protean mosaic appearance of the composer and advances his legacy as a philosopher-composer in the Futurist era. Busoni’s bearing as a mage of Gesamtkunstwerk is fully reflected in this work, which is steadily gaining in popularity. An “invisible” male choir sings a portion, in German, of Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin, with apostrophes to Allah. Concerto for Piano, Orchestra, and Male Choir in C major, Op. 39 premiered in 1904 with Busoni himself on piano, and Karl Muck conducting the Berlin Philharmoniker. Today’s performance with pianist Kirill Gerstein and Finnish maestro Sakari Oramo marks the second Philharmoniker performance in Berlin in over a century, at a time when the work is steadily gaining in popularity with performers and listeners alike.
Busoni’s musical colleague and neighbor in Manhattan at the time was a composer that understood more than any the desire for all-encompassing transcendence in composition: Gustav Mahler. Busoni’s Opus 39 might well be the piano concerto Mahler never penned.
A bevy of great fingers have gripped and scaled this pianistic Everest. Yet, many mainstream pianists have never attempted it due to the scale of accompanying forces as well as the unimaginable difficulty. Finding the occasion and resources, so far beyond the pale of an ordinary concerto, is almost an impossibility. The first live broadcast was in 1966 with Pietro Scarpini, conducted by Rafael Kubelik with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. In 1967, English pianist John Ogdon performed the work in a studio production with Daniell Revenaugh conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus. This recording was the first on a major label, and established the concerto, as well as Ogdon, as superlatives but “apart” from most classical concerto addicts’ sensibilities. Early performances were met with seething critiques mocking the outsized dimensions and Busoni’s virtuosic overreaching. Since the 1960s, however, Garrick Ohlsson, Christopher Falzone, Marc-André Hamelin, Benjamin Grosvenor and others have all mastered it. In 2022, the Orchestre e Coro dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia with Igor Levit and Sir Antonio Pappano gave a stunning performance at Philharmonie Berlin, tossing a gauntlet to the house orchestra. In the same year, at Bard’s Fischer Hall, Australian pianist Piers Lane offered it along with Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto (with Danny Driver).
However, nothing of the past comes close to what we had today with Kirill Gerstein and Sakari Oramo. The two are heard on a recent CD with the Boston Symphony that has garnered praise as the “best yet” amongst Busoni aficionados. I would say that the Boston performance was, indeed, magnificent, but what we heard today was different. Firstly, there is the pacing. I don’t have performance timings yet, but I suspect we heard the fleetest performance of any before it. The tarantella was especially up-tempo to near breathtakingly precipitous climaxes. Given that this movement is considered already the most technically demanding, the extra propulsion was a marvel of pianism and orchestral coordination. Secondly, Oramo’s phrasing did not articulate successive episodes as one might expect. He took the broadest arc giving coherence to unwanted rambling that discrete episodes sometimes impart. Thirdly, by shaping the work on the longer view, the three sections of the central movement, Pezzo serioso, stood out in relief and articulated the axis of symmetry of the entire work.
Kirill Gerstein possesses a mild-mannered presence. It was astonishing how he barely seemed to exert himself in the most Herculean of passages. Having the work so firmly in his hands was like hearing him play Bach’s Prelude in C Major. I’ve seen pianists practically dissolved in a puddle of sweat and exertion by the end of this concerto; he combines both artistic refinement and athleticism in a way that is rare among musicians of his generation. Gerstein is also a highly meditative musician who has given seminars by leading musical thinkers at the Kronberg Academy Seminars.
Sakari Oramo’s direction exhibits a warm, fresh, outgoing conducting style, imparting the love of the music to all under his baton. He seemed to have a complete grasp of the Busoni, particularly as suited to Gerstein’s acrobatic approach.
Another reason the Busoni is rarely performed is that it isn’t long enough to completely fill a program in spite of the ambitious performance dimensions of the work. Thus, a “filler” is needed. It never seems fair to refer to a great orchestral work like Debussy’s Nocturnes as such; however, for about 30 minutes it warms the orchestra and provides a different aspect of fin de siècle burgeoning modernism. Oramo certainly didn’t treat it as a benchwarmer: Fêtes was exciting without being overbearing in the climax, and Sirènes was highly nuanced, languishing, and graceful.
Gerstein and Oramo have given us a fresh look at a concertato masterpiece that is only gaining our attention and long overdue esteem. Hopefully, both will appear together again in the enormous concerto legacy that drives many of our classical concerts.
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