Naxos continues its edition, with pianist Wolf Harden, of Ferruccio Busoni's piano music, of which there is a lot, with most of it written at a very high level of difficulty and some invested in rather long pieces that require almost superhuman endurance. Volume six contains three rather uncommon pieces, starting with Busoni's piano transcription of Liszt's organ work Fantasy and Fugue on "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam," a piece recorded in part by Busoni's pupil Leo Sirota as early as the mid-'20s, but seldom visited since. ...
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Naxos continues its edition, with pianist Wolf Harden, of Ferruccio Busoni's piano music, of which there is a lot, with most of it written at a very high level of difficulty and some invested in rather long pieces that require almost superhuman endurance. Volume six contains three rather uncommon pieces, starting with Busoni's piano transcription of Liszt's organ work Fantasy and Fugue on "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam," a piece recorded in part by Busoni's pupil Leo Sirota as early as the mid-'20s, but seldom visited since. Liszt created his own four-hand version of the piece that is far more frequently played over Busoni's solo piano edition. This is followed by Busoni's early Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 20a, composed in 1883 when Busoni was 17, a relative rarity hardly known before the 1980s. The Prélude et Etude en Arpèges (1923) is a very late Busoni composition and the best-known work on the program; it is a highly regarded piece that bears some kinship with his never-finished opera Doktor Faustus....
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