Ferruccio Busoni was born in Empoli, Italy, in 1866. His father, Ferdinando, was a virtuoso clarinettist; his mother, Anna Weiss, was an accomplished pianist. They nurtured the boy’s talents so successfully that he gave his first public concert before he was eight years old. At ten, while on a visit to Vienna, he attracted the attention of Eduard Hanslick, the much-feared critic of Neue Freie Presse, who foretold a brilliant future for the young pianist. One of Busoni’s most vivid childhood memories dates from this time. He recalled being taken to Vienna by his parents to hear Liszt play a concert (March 16, 1877) to raise funds for the erection of a monument in honour of Beethoven. Liszt was to play the Emperor Concerto. The boy could not hide his disappointment at Liszt’s restrained style of playing, not knowing that a short time earlier Liszt had accidentally cut the index finger of his left hand while shaving. Rather than cancel the concert, Liszt decided to play the Emperor with the notes distributed among the remaining nine fingers. The next day Busoni was taken by his mother to play for Liszt, who, while he was pleased with the boy’s talent, refused to write a testimonial for him. From such unlikely beginnings, musical history was made. Liszt was central to Busoni’s development, both as a pianist and as a composer. The shining example of Liszt’s phenomenal career touched Busoni’s life at a hundred different points. He edited much of Liszt’s music, and included more of it in his public recitals than that of any other composer, as an inspection of his printed programmes shows. He also revived the Weimar masterclasses that Liszt had begun more than thirty years earlier (this at the personal invitation of Liszt’s former employer, the Grand Duke Carl Alexander). Busoni himself has told us that when he was already thirty years old, he began the study of the piano afresh in order to remedy what he considered to be defects in his playing. He turned to Liszt’s music. Out of the laws that he found there, Busoni rebuilt his technique. “Gratitude and admiration”, he wrote, “made Liszt at that time my master and my friend”. It was not as a pianist that Busoni wished to be remembered, however, but as a composer. He was always a reluctant virtuoso. This, too, evokes memories of Liszt. Busoni regarded piano playing as an inferior occupation, thrust upon him by the sheer necessity of having to make a living. He knew that his remarkable success as a pianist stood in the way of a wider appreciation of his music, and he went to his grave lamenting that fact. When Bernard Shaw met Busoni in London, in 1919, he advised him to compose under a different name, since the public would never believe that one man could be so supremely gifted in two branches of music at once. It is a regrettable fact that Busoni’s music, so striking and original, has not yet found a larger audience, though it has never lacked for individual advocates. Busoni’s compositions, like Liszt’s, fall into two great categories: original works and arrangements. His arrangements are so numerous, and are without exception so wonderfully crafted, that we place Busoni among the greatest practitioners in this field. His arrangements of Bach, especially, arouse widespread admiration and are today the most frequently performed of all Busoni’s works. Yet he had to overcome much prejudice in order to include them in his recitals. He locked horns in public both with critics and scholars on this issue, who accused him of desecrating the originals. His reply is worth noting: “Why are variations considered to be worthy because they change the original, while arrangements are considered to be unworthy because they too change the original?” There is no logical answer to that question. If we wish to understand something of the majesty of Busoni’s piano playing, and the enthroned golden sound which held his audiences in thrall, we need only turn to his Bach arrangements. They reveal Busoni’s interest in sonority (a vastly neglected aspect of piano playing today), and demand a huge range of colour. The celebrated Chaconne in D minor (c.1897) is a monumental achievement. It is far more than a simple transfer to the piano keyboard of Bach’s wonderfully inventive textures for solo violin. Rather, it amounts to a radical re-casting of Bach’s material, and sounds as if it were born on the keyboard. We are reminded of Liszt’s penetrating aphorism: “In matters of translation there are some exactitudes which are the equivalent of infidelities.” The equally famous arrangement of Bach’s organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor (1900) has captured the imagination of a number of famous piano transcribers - Tausig and Ignaz Friedman among them. But it is Busoni’s arrangement that reflects the full grandeur of the organ (the “king of instruments”) and is heard most frequently in the concert hall. The remaining arrangement on this disc is that of the Carmen Fantasie (1920), based on themes from Bizet’s opera. Busoni attached to this ravishing paraphrase the intriguing subtitle of “Kammerfantasie” (or Chamber Fantasy), thereby revealing something of its intimate, even anti-virtuosic character. Here Busoni seems to be brooding at the keyboard. He infuses Bizet’s sometimes trivial melodies with a mystical quality quite lacking in the originals and ennobles them through his commentary. He himself gave the first performance of the Fantasie in London, in 1920. Busoni’s original compositions, too, are represented here. The four pieces in his Indianisches Tagebuch (1915) flowed from his visits to America and his growing fascination with the melodies of the North American Indian, to which his attention had been drawn through the folkloristic studies of his pupil Natalie Curtis. The melodies are all transcribed and identified by her in “The Indians’ Book”, a standard text on the subject which Busoni esteemed. This same volume also provided Busoni with material for his Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra, which is thematically linked to the Tagebuch. Vastly different in style are the Fünf Kurze Stücke (1923), whose declared artistic purpose was “the study of part-playing”. This is the austere, problem-solving Busoni at work, the composer of the Fantasia Contrappuntistica (to which these pieces would form an excellent technical preparation), and the editor of Bach’s “48”. Typically, he dedicated these pieces to a pianist whose playing of the classics he greatly admired, Edwin Fischer. Busoni was profoundly attached to the music of Chopin, and included much of it in his recitals. He was only eighteen years old when, with all the audacity of youth, he wrote a set of Variations and Fugue in Free Form on Chopin’s Prelude in C minor (1884), one of the most over-played pieces that Chopin ever wrote. Many years later Busoni revisited this piece and re-cast it as Ten Variations on a Prelude of Chopin (1922). In its new form, it not only becomes a loving tribute to Chopin, but opens a door to the future. Busoni’s set of seven Elegies bears the curious subtitle “New Piano Pieces” (1908), a description which is only partly explained by their thematic links to some of his earlier music. The Elegie No. 2, for example, is based on material first composed for the massive Piano Concerto and takes its title All’Italia! from the last movement of that work. By calling these pieces “new”, Busoni seems to have had something more fundamental in mind. Tonality is stretched, bi-tonality emerges, and the language is generally less compromising, more futuristic. After he had composed these pieces, in fact, he wrote at the head of the first of them the phrase “Nach der Wendung” - “after the turning-point”. Busoni himself said of them: “I finally put down my entire personal vision, and for the first time, in the Elegies.” These words “personal vision” are an ideal epitaph for Busoni. For he was a visionary, the like of which the twentieth-century has not been able to reproduce. When Busoni died, in 1924, at the lamentably early age of fifty-six, that intrepid composer-critic Kaikhosru Sorabji wrote a commemorative essay in which he described Busoni as “an artistic and intellectual Titan”. May these performances commemorate the memory of the “Titan”, and may Sorabji’s words give us pause for thought in the year 1999 - the seventy-fifth anniversary of Busoni’s death.

[ALAN WALKER is the author of the prize-winning, three-volume biography of Franz Liszt]

VALERIE TRYON’s career as a concert pianist began while she was still a child. Before she was twelve she had broadcast for the BBC and was appearing regularly before the public on the concert platform. She wasone of the youngest students ever to be admitted to the Royal Academy of Music where she received the highest award in piano playing and a bursary which took her to Paris for study with Jacques Février. Her place among Britain’s acknowledged artists was assured when a Cheltenham Festival recital brought her the enthusiastic acclaim of the country’s foremost critics. Since then she has played in most of the major concert halls and appeared with many of the leading orchestras in Britain. Her career has latterly taken her from Britain to North America where she has appeared in such cities as Toronto, Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. She now lives in Canada where she is the Artist-in-Residence of Hamilton’s McMaster University, but spends a part of each year in her native Britain. Her repertoire is enormous and ranges from Bach to contemporary composers; it includes more than sixty concertos and a vast amount of solo and chamber music. Her passion for solo and chamber music is represented extensively through concerts and recordings. She presently plays with the Rembrandt Piano Trio (based in Toronto) which has made a number of recordings for Dorian Records. Her chamber and solo recordings for CBC Records are critically acclaimed. Harold Schonberg of the New York Times described her disc (CBC MVCD 1092), CHOPIN; SCHERZOS AND BALLADES, as “the most significant Chopin recording of the past decade.” Valerie Tryon has been awarded several distinctions for her service to music. She was an early recipient of the Harriet Cohen Medal. More recently, the Liszt Memorial Plaque was bestowed on her by the Hungarian Minister of Culture in recognition of her lifelong promotion of Franz Liszt’s music.