A slumbering giant roars back to life

BUSONI PIANO CONCERTO

perf. Pietro Scarpini (piano), Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Chorus cond. Rafael Kubelik First Hand Recordings

Some pieces in the classical repertoire are so vast and fiendishly difficult that they rarely see the light of day. The Piano Concerto by Ferruccio Busoni is one of them. Born in 1866, Busoni was a gifted pianist in the heroic Lisztian mould, but as a composer he was a visionary genius who dreamed of a new kind of music as wild and irregular as nature. That makes him sound like a modernist, but he also worshipped Bach and the great musical traditions of the Italian culture into which he was born, and the German one that he consciously adopted.

In the early Piano Concerto of 1904, he tries to embrace all this with virtuoso extravagance, ending in a setting for a male chorus of a mystical poem by the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger.

“Lift up your hearts to the eternal Force,” it says. “Feel Allah close to you, observe his works!”

This live recording, which has lain untouched in the archives of Bavarian Radio for more than 50 years, has some inevitable fluffed notes in the more tumultuous passages, and the tuning of the Bavarian orchestra’s woodwind leaves something to be desired – as does the recorded sound. None of this really matters, as the performance is so emotionally capacious.

Busoni’s score is littered with countless performance indications such as “lampeggiato”

– like lightning – “indugiando”– doubtful – and “morbidissimo”, a term impossible to translate but which means something like “as sweetly as possible”. The soloist Pietro Scarpino catches all these, and he’s equally alive to the diabolical humour of the second movement, which feels like a parade of grinning commedia dell’arte characters.

He and conductor Rafael Kubelik are perfectly at one, even in the crazy helter-skelter of the fourth movement tarantella. In the Finale the Bavarian Radio Chorus summon a quiet, focused intensity which is profoundly moving. In all, this recording gets closer to the poetic heart of this strange work than any other.