Ferruccio Busoni - Busoni And His Pupils (1922-1952) (2004)

Ferruccio Busoni was one of the greatest pianists of his generation. What remains of his meagre recorded legacy are the published sides from the 1922 English Columbia sessions, as everything else was destroyed in a fire at the Columbia factory a few years later. If the most impressive performance on this disc is Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13 (Busoni gave a famous series of six piano recitals in Berlin of the music of Liszt), the Bach Chorale enables us to hear Busoni in one of his own arrangements, with extraordinary finger technique and control of tone. The Chopin Etudes, and particularly the Nocturne, amply demonstrate the ‘iron intellectual discipline’ that characterised Busoni’s style of Chopin playing in the concert hall. A friend and colleague of Busoni, the now legendary pianist Egon Petri took the mantle of his master upon him after Busoni’s death.