Barbican Hall
Grażyna Bacewicz: Symphony no.2
Ferruccio Busoni: Piano Concerto in C major, op.83
Kirill Gerstein (piano)
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| Images: Copyright: BBC/Sarah-Louise Bennett |
The centenary of Ferruccio Busoni’s death fell earlier this year, not that ninety-nine per cent of the musical world appears to have noticed. Where are the operas, even his masterpiece and summa, Doktor Faust this year, or any other? His Turandot will never rival Puccini’s for popularity, nor for various other attributes, least of all disturbingly alluring sadism. Yet, though I admire both, I think Busoni’s is ultimately the better piece. In the meantime, the BBC Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, Sakari Oramo, and Kirill Gerstein offered a rare opportunity to hear his genre- and much-else-defying Piano Concerto, which in its finale offers a male chorus setting of words from the Danish Romantic Adam Oelenschläger’s Aladdin, in Oelenschläger’s own German translation (long since superseded), which Busoni at one point considered turning into an opera. If that sounds more like Beethoven’s Ninth than any of his piano concertos – not, if truth be told, the work has much in common with either – then it points to an important truth: namely, that this superlative pianist and veteran of many a piano concerto, historical and contemporary, chose in his own to write, without sparing the pianist great technical challenges, a work that was more operatic symphony with piano than concerto in any traditional sense, adversarial or otherwise.
A composer such as Busoni needs a champion, and Gerstein probably has better claim than any other current performing musician to the title. During the 2022-23 season, he gave a series of three concerts at the Wigmore Hall, entitled ‘Busoni and his World’. I attended two and left enriched by both. He has also been performing the Piano Concerto, a live recording with Sakari Oramo and the Boston Symphony Orchestra having been warmly acclaimed. I have yet to hear it, but if it is anything like this performance with Oramo and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, it should be snapped up by anyone with the slightest interest or curiosity. I suspect it will be in broad outline, since swift overall timings of about seventy minutes are common to both. For the sake of comparison, John Ogdon takes about seventy-eight and Victoria Postnikova manages to stretch it to almost ninety. A signal achievement of this performance, though was that such thoughts never entered the mind. The work did not even seem long, but rather, like a Mahler symphony, the precise length that it needed to be, compelling from beginning to end.
Indeed, from the outset, soloist, conductor, and for the most part orchestra approached it as if it were a repertory piece. The first movement flowed with notable fluency, with no question as to its depths. Whatever this is, it is not a ‘surface’ work. There was a Beethovenian strength to the string foundations, the Seventh Symphony in particular coming to mind. Gerstein, on his first entry, showed himself both secure in command and inviting—even if we did not yet quite know to what he and Busoni were inviting us. He made the massive piano chords sing in themselves, but equally in counterpoint with the orchestra, unleashing Faustian energy yet also relishing the more ‘feminine’ – in the old, gendered typology – passages in which Doktor Faust itself is at its least successful. If the creation of music from often simple elements required Beethovenian struggle, it rarely sounded like it, the effect closer to Mozart, to Liszt, and occasionally to Brahms. One sensed if not the birth of Busoni’s Junge Klassität, then a milestone in its evolution.
That Classical-Romantic line ran through the following Pezzo giocoso too, its energy almost yet not quite delirious in piano and orchestra alike. Like its predecessor, it seemed effortlessly to capture the protean spirit of its composer, here pointing, tambourine and all, toward the warm, Mediterranean south. The longer Pezzo serioso struck, unsurprisingly, a more serious, even Teutonic note, pianistic shadows and rays of winter sun from the worlds of Beethoven and Brahms set against surprisingly Wagnerian trombones: a magical combination. Form was unerringly communicated as was a musical narrative perhaps closer to that of Liszt’s symphonic poems than to Strauss. Faustian tones became more pronounced, as if the good doctor himself were seated at the piano, performing his own concerto. The fourth movement tarantella sounded as a truly Italian vision, albeit an Italy different from anyone else’s. In its Lisztian figuration, we experienced a unique, even outrageous fever. And how could we not smile at the evocation of Rossini on entering the realm of commedia dell’arte?
The transition to the final movement, as the male chorus stood, was a thing of wonder. Busoni instructed that it should be invisible, and the effect would doubtless be all the more magical if it were, if perhaps at the cost of intelligibility, though we had (welcome) surtitles in this case. A quietly ecstatic new and final chapter opened: ‘Lifet up your hearts to the Power Eternal. Feel Allah’s presence. Behold all his works.’ A splendidly warm and consoling choral sound led us into a realm in which it was difficult not to think, perhaps through a Goethian lens, of Die Zauberflöte—and of Mahler. The rapturous acclaim with which Gerstein and his fellow performers met was fully justified. I have no doubt it will prove to be one of my musical memories of 2024.
Preceding it, we had heard Grażyna Bacewicz’s Second Symphony, a much shorter and more modest work, far from without its virtues, yet paling when placed beside the Busoni. The BBC SO and Oramo summoned just the right sort of mid-century sound in a committed performance of this 1951 work. Other composers came to mind, Prokofiev and Bartók in the first movement, Hindemith later on, but Bacewicz was never merely to be reduced to them, her personal contrasts of ‘voice’ and texture holding the attention throughout. The second movement evoked unease through traditional harmony and counterpoint. The third, a scherzo proved incisive and ambiguous. In the finale, not for the first time, the composer showed her ability not only to write a melody but to ensure that it was generated from the material in which it found itself. Bacewicz’s symphony could probably have found a more suitable home than this concert, but it was a good opportunity to make its acquaintance.