Busoni VC

[Glazier]

Any opinions of this work? Sounds good to me.

[JimL]

It's a weird, over-the-top work.  I haven't listened to it for a while, but I like it a lot.  However, I don't love it as much as I do some other works.  It's a little too clever.

[Alan Howe]

It has a hard-ish edge for a VC written at the end of the 19th century - the beginnings of Busonian neo-classicism, maybe. The recording with Zimmermann on Sony makes an excellent case for it, though. Well worth investigating overall.

[Marcus]

Alan & Jim have "nailed it" fairly well, although I have never been a huge fan of Busoni.
Marcus.

[Steve B]

Yes beautiful- and  "weird". Busoni never quite brought together his emotion with his intellect; the latter constantly overrides the former. But i quite like him. Steve

[jimmosk]

I love it, and can't fathom why it isn't played a lot more often -- maybe not as much as the Tchaikovsky, but I would expect to see it on concerts more than the Saint-Saëns Third. As for being 'weird'... well, that's a relative term. Compared to Busoni's piano concerto (in five movements, the last of which is choral), it's tame.
Like a lot of Busoni, he tosses so many ideas into the piece that it seems like several concerti in one, but I find his ideas fit my head well, so I keep wanting more.

-J

--
Jim Moskowitz
The Unknown Composers Page:  http://kith.org/jimmosk/TOC.html
My latest list of unusual classical CDs for auction:  http://tinyurl.com/jimmosk

[chill319]

I'm not sure 'intellect' is exactly the right word for Busoni, though I know why one would use it. Busoni's keyboard finger exercises are not only unconventional but extremely useful. They're brilliant, but no more grounded in intellect than the 'Australian crawl' (which some person swam first). They grow out of doing and experience rather than talking and theory. I feel the same way about Dr Faustus.