 View
from the Stage: Garrick Ohlsson on Busoni
by Robert Rimm
Busoni's music has begun to appear regularly
on concert stages the world over. His opera
Doktor Faust, the grand culmination of his
spiritual aspirations, is now recognized
as one of opera's supreme masterpieces.
The piano music, given its intensity, intricacy
and inwardness stretched over vast emotional
realms, requires of pianists the highest
commitment, mental acuity and physical achievement.
Winner of Italy's Busoni competition at
age 18, Garrick Ohlsson is just such a musician.
His series of three Busoni-themed concerts
during the 2002-03 season, presented by
New York's Lincoln Center, were revelatory
to his audiences. Shortly thereafter, we
spent an animated afternoon talking about
the composer. Ohlsson is a well-read, ebullient
man, full of immediate ideas and enthusiastic
tangents.
"When I undertook to do those concerts,"
he began, "I knew they would be a huge challenge.
Even with my own experience, though, perhaps
I underestimated just what the challenge
involved! I had played through much Busoni
over the years, especially in the fertile
teenage years and twenties when one has
lots of time just to read through music.
Virtually all of it is back in print now,
including some pieces I'd never heard before.
I wanted to juxtapose many of these works
with those Busoni related to and was influenced
by, to contextualize his own pieces." Accordingly,
Ohlsson interspersed several major Bach
and Liszt works with the Busoni that comprised
most of these programs. They were a major
success for performer, audience and presenter
alike.
Why, then, is Busoni not performed more
often? "I'm not sure his time has arrived
in the sense that Mahler's has," Ohlsson
responds. "The unanswered question is whether
Busoni will become the great undiscovered
figure from the past who, when we finally
break through, is going to sweep the world.
But his music has everything for the performer.
We've seen firsthand that audiences enthusiastically
respond when his music is done well, when
contexted well. Until you play a work like
the Fantasia Contrappuntistica in public,
there's a whole element of architecture
that you cannot feel, much different than
playing in one's living room. I was fully
prepared for the audience to be bolting
for the doors by about the third fugue,
but they stay stayed and cheered! It's such
a magnificent work, the first time I had
programmed it. I learned most of these works
for this occasion, and drove myself a bit
crazy with all the work! But I hope I've
helped to legitimize Busoni as someone suitable
for public venues of live music. Other pianists
should recognize that they can have great
success with this fascinating repertoire.
It is not weird cul-de-sac music, far from
digging into third-rate rarities. I do love
the corners of the repertoire, though, as
did Busoni.
"At the most primal level, Busoni often
wrote soft, enigmatic endings, and while
wonderful, they may leave the public a bit
befuddled, especially with works they don't
know. What a strange collection of endings
Liszt also has in his later works. He was
obviously not concerned with provoking storms
of applause and neither was Busoni. There's
also the question of Busoni's flexible musical
language. It changed and evolved, often
exceeding the bounds of tonality. And such
contrast! Even though the Sonatina Seconda
and All'Italia are chronologically close
pieces, when programming them together the
audience may think they're by two different
composers. There's also the mystical side
of Busoni that people may not respond to.
But then, the Toccata is a great stand-alone
piece. So brilliant and entertaining, so
characteristically engaging to the ear.
Busoni had a sort of Liszt-plus ear, with
pedaling and sonorities extending conventional
sounds. A piece like the Chopin Variations
is accessible not just because it contains
a Chopin prelude, but it's a real barnburner
with its pacing, brilliance and fabulous
ending. Pianists are a pretty adventurous
bunch, actually, better than average, so
I'm hoping that more musicians take up the
cause."
Ohlsson's first teacher, Tom Lishman, was
a grand-pupil of Busoni. "He was the first
musically cultured person I knew. So Busoni
was part of the firmament, which he isn't
for many pianists growing up. I played the
Sonatina Seconda by the time I was twelve.
He adored Busoni and clearly felt that he
was a standard part of musical life. Many
people today don't realize what a towering
figure he was in his time, in all respects
a continent-striding giant, as it were,
and wildly popular. Irma Wolpe, Rosina Lhevinne
and so many other older musicians and teachers
I came in contact with early on, some of
whom had actually heard Busoni, were in
agreement that he was an irresistible force.
There was no one like him. As people used
to say about Liszt, you may not have agreed
with him, but Busoni was head and shoulders
above most others. Critics took him on,
vividly. True, he gave them a lot to take
on. He was such a deeply thoughtful, penetrating
and even willful musician. Brilliant beyond
belief. The one pianist to cause German
audiences to break into applause in the
middle of La Campanella. In Berlin in those
days, that was really something to do! And
in a period when Liszt represented just
the tawdriest music, Busoni was at the forefront.
He pioneered so much music, new and old.
Busoni the composer, pianist, transcriber,
teacher and conductor melded into endlessly
creative and fecund musician. Where he found
the time and energy to do so, I don't know,
but without a cell phone and computer, he
must have had a lot more time! Tom gave
me a lot of Busoni, the Breitkopf & Härtel
editions that were not then in print.
"When I was 13, I began to study with Sasha
Gorodnitsky at Juilliard. I played a Bach-Busoni
transcription for him, and he let me know
that those things weren't done in those
days, in competitions or concerts. In the
60s, that was largely true. My introduction
to the purity of Bach began at that time.
Everyone who played Bach on the piano took
a stance. You either harpsichorded or pedaled
it, or you Glenn Goulded it, or you did
this or that. That argument has largely
run its course. But Bach is malleable, expressing
so much. As Busoni said beautifully, when
you transcribe a work for another instrument,
it's not merely a question of arranging
the notes so that they fit on the instrument.
The genius of Busoni's transcriptions is
that they really sound like phenomenal piano
works. I have to confess, I have difficulty
listening to some of these works on the
organ because of its unrelenting sustained
quality and non-differentiation of voices.
In a piece as busy as St. Anne, there's
not a lot of time to have a free hand for
registration. That's not a complaint against
organs or organists; I just hear it better
on the piano. But of course I'm a pianist
with my brain formed by piano sounds. In
most cases, Bach welcomed the multi-instrumental
approach."
Since his death, Busoni's reputation has
not always reflected what a leading figure
he was. Further, while one easily points
to a Beethoven or a Chopin tradition, the
Busoni canon has been less fortunate. While
students such as Egon Petri and other virtuosi
such as Claudio Arrau espoused Busoni's
music, sustained involvement by touring
pianists has been sporadic. The dominant
Russian tradition, by contrast, has continued
unabated. In Ohlsson's case, at Juilliard
he studied with Gorodnitsky, who studied
with Josef Lhevinne, one of Anton Rubinstein's
students.
Ohlsson views the liberties Busoni took
as both pianist and transcriber part of
the composer-pianist tradition of the era.
"I just love what Busoni did with the works
he played. It's certainly a red herring
for critics, though. We lived in a very
puritanical age in the 20th century. Back
to Busoni's time, he was a modernist and
a low-interventionist editor - although interventionist
by our standards - and he hadn't lived long
enough to come across the threshold of the
new objectivity. Arrau, Toscanini and others
coming from the high romantic tradition
got the purity idea and Urtext editions
came into vogue. A good thing, because 19th-century
editors edited like crazy, even to the point
of changing notes and dynamics. Of course,
to go as far as Busoni did in a Well-Tempered
Clavier edition and change the actual fugues
to go with the preludes! Hey, I don't think
it's the worst thing in the world, and he
didn't say it must be done that way, but
it's a fascinating conception. Even Beethoven
didn't start out thinking that all works
are unified from beginning to end. The process
was more alive, the way jazz is. If you
talk to living composers, they're usually
pleased that you're engaged with the work
at all. We've become so afraid of what's
perceived as capriciousness or willfulness,
changing things such as what Busoni did
with Schoenberg's Op. 11. Busoni took considerable
time to learn, digest and recast one of
those pieces. He wasn't being patronizing;
it was just a part of his philosophy.
"I have these sporadic flings with Busoni
that get public recognition. In the spring
of 1966, I heard Pietro Scarpini play the
Concerto with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra
at Carnegie Hall. I remember just loving
it! Little did I think that 23 years later
I'd be sitting with the same orchestra on
stage playing it. Dohnányi - always a pusher
for the new and unusual - had wanted to do
the work, and he wondered who in the world
played this thing. It was incredibly sweet,
the flowering of a dream of mine. I've grown
to love every bit of the Concerto. The entire
breadth of the middle movement was the hardest
for me to come to terms with. It's so solemn,
earnest and intense. The Concerto reflects
the monumentality of its time; one thinks
of Shoenberg's Gurrelieder, the Mahler symphonies,
some Zemlinsky works. It also has sardonic
and ironic qualities among its sheer intellectual
brilliance and cleverness. I turned to Dohnányi
in a rehearsal, mentioning how difficult
the music was, pointing out arpeggios without
one exact repetition. Dohnányi answered,
'Busoni's way too intelligent for that!'
That's one of the most difficult things
about learning Busoni. The patterns keep
evolving and changing within themselves,
steeped in so much counterpoint.
"The Elegies give you a complete sense of
the guy. They have a kind of testament quality
and represent a period in his life that
he felt himself yet again changing definitively.
He liked new beginnings all the time. Scriabin,
similarly changing and growing, may be the
most analogous composer to Busoni in terms
of language.
Back to the Toccata, it is a difficult piece
in every way! It certainly points forward
to the very 20th-century treatment of the
piano by Prokofiev and Bartók, to a more
purely percussive sound. It is written with
so much chromaticism, concluding with a
very bleak, somewhat sinister ending, revealing
an extremely dark side of him. Its remote,
desolate chromaticism is interrupted by
tremendous surges of energy. This music
surely has an eruptive, volcanic quality,
its darker aspects contained within so many
of the modulations and motives. The Toccata,
in common with so much of Busoni's music,
is not easily categorized. Its polytonality
and atonality combine into an almost impressionistic
sound. Those textures couldn't have happened
at any other time in musical history. Busoni
created ethereal, mystical watercolor evocations
on the piano. Everything from the most pointillistic
to the most lush. He possessed so many painterly
details, without the standard triumphant,
resolved endings. A very modern, angst-filled
man."
Ohlsson has no immediate plans to record
these works. However, he notes, "I havea
number of things stewing in my brain. These
days musicians like to make recordings before
concerts happen. I will certainly want to
get around to recording Busoni,but some
pieces will need more time, particularly
the Fantasia Contrappuntistica. I'm so excited
and entranced by his music, though, and
may well make a Bach-Busoni CD. It's just
such hard work!" Ohlsson laughs easily at
the thought, at once recognizing and embracing
the singular qualities in Busoni's music
that today's musicians have become increasingly
willing and eager to confront.
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