The music of Ferruccio Busoni was comparatively neglected for many decades, perhaps because he didn't fit any of the "-isms" that were contending to be the main line of musical development. There was too much Liszt in his music for him to be part of the neo-Classical crowd. Now that it's clear that that effort was itself a big part of classical music's problems, Busoni is showing up on more programs and recordings. He wrote tonal music, which for some disqualified him right off the bat. And there was a dry, rigorous quality ...
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The music of Ferruccio Busoni was comparatively neglected for many decades, perhaps because he didn't fit any of the "-isms" that were contending to be the main line of musical development. There was too much Liszt in his music for him to be part of the neo-Classical crowd. Now that it's clear that that effort was itself a big part of classical music's problems, Busoni is showing up on more programs and recordings. He wrote tonal music, which for some disqualified him right off the bat. And there was a dry, rigorous quality even to his slightest compositions that placed him far from late Romanticism. Annotator Richard Whitehouse puts it nicely here when he writes that Busoni was "neither inherently conservative nor demonstratively radical," and that his innovations "were bound up with a re-creative approach to the musical past that has only gained wider currency over recent decades." In a way, John Adams is one of his heirs.This disc, part of a series of Naxos releases covering all of Busoni's piano...
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