ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Radio: Busoni’s Big Concerto

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31081, 9 June 1966, Page 12

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Radio: Busoni’s Big Concerto

Any performance of

Busoni’s remarkable Piano Concerto is something of an occasion for it is Immensely long and for the soloist immensely difficult.

Lasting 68 minutes, the work goes through its five movements without a break, and has a male-voice choir singing Oehlenschlaeger’s “Aladdin” in the finale. Its exemplars are fairly clearly Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Liszt’s concertos and the Spanish Rhapsody (which Busoni transcribed for piano and orchestra), and to some extent Brahms’s B flat concerto, but there is also a large

amount of extraordinary Busoni. For the virtuoso there is not glittering success. The soloist is kept busy with rapid Lisztian figuration and is

almost as constantly kept in his place as accompanist and builder of non-thematic bridge passages. The music critic of “The Times” says the pianists who dare assail this monstrous peak have to be musician as well as virtuoso, “and when they are, and when they get to the top, they drag an audience through scrub and forestry and waterfall, over chasm, and it almost seems round Troy’s walls seven

times seven at forelock’s end; and exhausting as the operation is for everybody, it can be ineffably exhilarating and uplifting.” Tomorrow evening, after a talk recorded by Esther Fisher, a New Zealand pianist who met Busoni on a number of occasions, 3YC will broadcast a highly regarded performance of the concerto by John Ogdon, with Meredith Davies conducting the Philharmonia. “We hear the concerto every three years or so, and no-one need ask for more,” Andrew Porter wrote in the “Financial Times” but if

ever it becomes popular, performances like this will be the reason.” Although London may hear the concerto every three years, it was only this year that the 62-year-old work had its first performance in New York, under rather competitive circumstances. Last year George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra decided to include the work in their annual Carnegie Hall series. They decided on February 7, engaged Pietro Scarpini, an Italian pianist who has played the work, and arranged for the male section of the Cleveland Chorus -to travel to New York. The or-

chestra ordered the score from the company which controlled American rights, and was assured it had sole rights to the New York premiere. Meanwhile, in Florida, Daniell Revenaugh, a 30-year-old pianist and conductor who had studied with Busoni's most eminent pupil, Egon Petri, had formed a Busoni Society which held a Busoni festival in Indianapolis. Revenaugh decided to kick off the Busoni centennial year in New York with a performance of the piano concerto and booked Carnegie Hall for January 26. By a search of the Library of Congress records and the files of the publishers, he found that he was free to perform the work because the ■aipyright had not been renewed when it had expired in 1934. The publishers, because of their commitment to the Cleveland orchestra, would not supply orchestral parts so Revenaugh had a copyist write them out from Xeroxed copies of the Library of Congress score.

Revenaugh had the first premiere, but “High Fidelity/ Musical America” suggested that his conducting sabotaged the efforts of his soloist Gunnar Johansen, and that although the Cleveland performance was much better, it could not hold a candle to a performance at the Holland Festival by John Ogdon and the Rotterdam Philharmonic under Franz-Paul Decker. Decker, it will be recalled, was that tremendous conductor with the N.Z.B.C. Symphony last time it was in town. RIMSKY FIND

A trombone concerto by Rimsky-Korsakov was discovered by the Russians in 1951. It has now been recorded by an American ensemble and will be broadcast for the first time from 3YC in Saturday’s “New Records” programme.