There are piano concertos, after which there’s Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto.
Completed and premiered in 1904 by the Berlin Philharmonic with the composer, a virtuoso of Lisztian potential, on the piano, the piece retains a near mystical reputation. It is so troublesome that solely probably the most commanding of pianists dare tackle its 75 minutes and 5 actions. In the final and oddest of them, a male refrain implores listeners to attract near Allah, singing from the textual content of an early Nineteenth-century model of “Aladdin” by the Danish playwright Adam Oehlenschläger.
If the concerto is carried out extra typically than it was once, it’s nonetheless sufficient of an anomaly within the repertoire that performances are a big occasion, one in every of which is its San Francisco Symphony premiere this week, with the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and the pianist Igor Levit, joined by the boys of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus.
In a joint interview, Salonen and Levit spoke in regards to the concerto and Busoni’s confounding stature right now. Here are edited excerpts from the dialog.
My first query is, why?
ESA-PEKKA SALONEN May I suggest a counter-question? Why not? Last time we carried out collectively, which was a few years in the past, we had slightly chat over dinner about what to do subsequent. We each occur to like the Busoni, and we thought, OK, let’s do it. These are choices which might be simply remodeled dinner, after which once you get to it, you notice what you’ve achieved. Still, I’m very pleased, and the extra I research the piece the extra I prefer it, which is definitely an excellent signal, as a result of it’s not all the time like that. Some of the concepts, particularly harmonic concepts, are unimaginable.
I can’t make up my thoughts whether or not it’s a parody, or lethal critical, or what.
IGOR LEVIT I feel it’s each. It’s extremely celebratory. I imply, the roof flies off the constructing, proper? In the “All’Italiana,” it’s very satirical. It’s extremely stunning, it’s humorous, it’s solemn. It has all of it.
Busoni has all the time been a kind of position fashions I by no means met, in a manner like an idol determine, relating to the best way he thought and particularly wrote about music, his utopian thought about what free music really is, his thought about what the creator’s job is, which is to arrange your personal guidelines and never comply with the principles of others.
As a composer, as a pianist, as a thinker, instructor, we’re talking right here of one of the vital unimaginable minds of at the very least the twentieth century. He was this larger-than-life determine, and I feel it’s a larger-than-life piano concerto.
We hardly hear Busoni’s music now, and but he was so vital traditionally.
SALONEN He actually was a trailblazer, and he predicted a number of issues that are actually commonplace in up to date music, like microtonality. He even in some unspecified time in the future was fantasizing about computer systems, earlier than the idea even existed.
As a Finnish musician, I have to say that we’re very grateful to him, as a result of he spent a few years in Helsinki. He was a really, very unusual chook in Helsinki cultural life. And he was an extremely essential affect to Sibelius, as a result of Sibelius suffered from this type of nation boy complicated in comparison with contemporaries like Richard Strauss.
Busoni and Sibelius grew to become actually good mates. I’m completely certain that to have any person like that as a dialog accomplice and ingesting buddy — they did fairly a little bit of that apparently — was extremely essential. They even had slightly membership, a gaggle of mates who known as themselves Leskovites, as a result of Busoni’s canine was known as Lesko. There’s a bar in Helsinki the place they frolicked and developed the brand new music for the following century.
LEVIT One of crucial academics I had in my life was Matti Raekallio. Matti is from Helsinki. Matti’s thesis was on Busoni’s fingering. He launched me to the concerto after I was 19. He launched me to the “Fantasia Contrappuntistica.” He launched me to the best way Busoni would play the piano, which is a really positional sort of taking part in, and never a graphic sort of taking part in.
For, let’s say, a standard piano participant, who grew up with guidelines and who studied in Central Europe or wherever, there isn’t a such factor as Ferruccio Busoni, all you realize is Bach-Busoni. You may know two or three of his chorale preludes. That’s it. But you don’t get in contact with the precise man. It was Matti who opened this unimaginable door for me into the considering of the person and to the music. So even I do know Busoni by Finland.
SALONEN It’s humorous: The first time I ever heard something by Busoni was after I was a composition pupil in Siena, Italy, with Donatoni again within the late ’70s. There was a live performance when some Italian pianist performed Busoni’s arrangement of Schoenberg’s Opus 11, three piano items. He organized Schoenberg’s piano items for the piano. And I believed that was the silliest factor I’d ever heard in my life.
Igor, is the concerto as laborious as everybody says it’s?
LEVIT Yeah, this can be a piece to widen your curse phrases repertoire.
What are the toughest issues in it?
LEVIT There are moments within the second motion that, I imply, they’re simply past what ought to be acceptable when it comes to how a lot you need to work to realize a sure consequence. Toward the tip, there’s this somewhat lengthy passage with extremely troublesome jumps, that are asymmetrical between the left hand and the best hand. This alone is sort of utopian, and it’s additionally written such that nobody within the viewers will really hear what you’re doing, as a result of the orchestra is so large.
There is a spot within the “All’Italiana,” proper after the cadenza, the place the piano has these enormous chords in left and proper and so they run towards one another. It’s form of unachievable, and but, so what? You continuously are conscious of the truth that you as a pianist, are in the midst of taking part in one thing extraordinary.
It doesn’t strike me as a straightforward piece to conduct, both. The balances, for one factor.
SALONEN Well, it’s large, and as Igor stated, there are moments that for those who don’t cut back the dynamics and type it out, the piano will probably be drowned.
LEVIT [Laughing] Please don’t cut back the dynamics and type it out.
SALONEN But there are moments in Brahms’s piano concertos the place the piano sort of sinks into the orchestra, and I feel a part of the expression is that zoom-in, zoom-out factor. It can be very boring for those who had 75 minutes of the piano being fully on the floor at each second. And on this case, the piano has completely different roles.
What is the finale there for?
SALONEN I’ve seen many incomprehensible, bizarre texts in my life that composers have used, however this one is true up there. I feel he was planning to put in writing a music-dramatic work primarily based on the textual content by this Danish man. He by no means acquired additional than setting the ultimate refrain, after which that discovered its manner into the Piano Concerto.
The story of this textual content is so humorous, as a result of the playwright was Danish, and he wrote the textual content in German, however his German was not nice. He went and browse it out loud to Goethe, and he learn it out of the Danish model and translated it into German on the fly. I’m making an attempt to think about Goethe simply sitting there listening to this man undergo this limitless play, in unhealthy German. And then numerous editors went by three or 4 rounds to repair the grammar, and at last, there’s a model that’s grammatically acceptable. However, Busoni favored the primary model with all of the mistaken circumstances and mistaken articles.
LEVIT Of course he did.
SALONEN And there’s one thing actually fabulous about that. It’s principally the boulders within the cave the place Aladdin takes the lamp again to. The boulders are very grateful, and so they reward Allah for the fantastic thing about nature. And quite a lot of it’s fully incomprehensible.
LEVIT But then once more we’re talking about Busoni, who was one of many nice internationalists. You’re speaking about this universally educated and universally man. So it’s all incomprehensible and odd and bizarre, and but not shocking in any way.
SALONEN So, we’re followers.
LEVIT Exactly.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com