Geoffrey Douglas Madge - Busoni: Piano Works, Vol. 2 (2008)

Busoni needs listening to in extenso, troughs (not deep ones) as well as peaks. He was the first to acknowledge that his mature style was late in developing, but he was no late starter: the earliest music here, and pretty accomplished it is too, was written at 12 years old and by the age of 18 he had written the remarkable Variations and Fugue on Chopin's C minor Prelude, a tour de force of late nineteenth-century pianism and sonorous inventiveness. Busoni's problem, or rather the dilemma that his work strives to solve, was that he had the virtuoso performer's deep committedness to the music of the past as well as the creator's preoccupation with the present and the future. Hence, in a way, all those 'creative transcriptions' of earlier music, of Bach above all, and hence the attempt in Busoni's 'original' music to find a modern style that would not deny the past but embrace it. On casual acquaintance this can seem like unoriginality: using other men's music or styles to make up for a lack of personal identity. Busoni's frequent re-use of his own music might be seen to reinforce this view: a creative personality that could only run to a few ideas, which then perforce had to be repeatedly recycled.
Madge plays with quite stunning technical control and an evident love of rich and complex piano sonorities that matches Busoni's own (and if he pounds with his left hand rather in some of the earlier music, it is no doubt what the composer would have done himself). He has all the necessary stamina that the bigger pieces demand, but is no less sensitive to more mysterious and poetic pages. The performances were recorded live (though there is not the slightest sign of an audience or of a large concert-hall acoustic), so there are a few minor fluffs of no real consequence.... the set is a major achievement and an eloquently compelling act of advocacy. -- Michael Oliver