Hyperion Records

Ferruccio Busoni has acquired a rather intimidating aura as a composer. Although revered as a pianist, it has been said more than once that his music excites more admiration than affection. His literary essays frequently venture more deeply into the metaphysical than most critics, and his music, too, became increasingly concerned with a world that was at once mystical and scientific, one which sought to rationalize the inexplicable. Small wonder, then, that musicians as well as music lovers confess themselves baffled by some of his experiments.

And yet, for all his intellectual prowess and curiosity, his three idols were Bach, Mozart and Liszt, who all had the gift of the most direct and immediate clarity of utterance. Alongside his painstaking growth as a composer, from his prolific and precocious juvenilia to the awesome grandeur of his final masterpiece, the opera Doktor Faust, Busoni's love of transcription was a recurring outlet for his pianistic and interpretative imagination. His magisterial pianistic reworking of Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin became so well established in the concert repertoire that his wife, Gerda, once found herself introduced at a reception as ‘Mrs Bach-Busoni’.

from notes by Hamish Milne ©