Busoni as Pianist (review)

"What this artist has achieved in piano technique borders on the supernatural," Grigory Kogan writes of Busoni (p. 19), and indeed Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) was one of the most technically brilliant pianists of his time. But his emotionally restrained and sometimes eccentric performances—in which he altered pitches, inserted extra repeats, and interpreted pieces in an idiosyncratic manner—were controversial. Despite the notoriety of his textual alterations among concert reviewers, few scholars have analyzed Busoni's performance style and technique in detail, in part because of the paucity or unreliability of primary source material. There is only one surviving acoustic disc of Busoni playing ten piano miniatures, recorded in London in 1922 for Columbia, dismissed by his own pupils and grand-pupils as unrepresentative of his style. The many piano rolls made by Busoni cannot be relied upon to accurately depict tempo, pedaling, or dynamics; and subjective eyewitness accounts are sometimes unreliable.

Busoni as Pianist by Grigory Kogan (1901-1979), originally published in Russian (Ferruchcho Buzoni [Moscow: Muzyka, 1964]) and only recently translated into English, is therefore an invaluable contribution to scholarship about Busoni's pianism. Although music critics and scholars from Kogan's time to the present, such as Harold C. Schonberg (The Great Pianists from Mozart to the Present, 2d ed. [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987]), Larry Sitsky (Busoni and the Piano: The Works, The Writings, and The Recordings [New York: Greenwood Press, 1986]) and Kenneth Hamilton (After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008]) have included discussions of Busoni's piano playing on acoustic recordings or piano rolls within more general texts about Busoni's life and works or performance trends and traditions, Kogan's entire monograph is dedicated to Busoni's piano playing and piano technique.

Throughout eighteen brief chapters, Kogan skillfully draws upon piano rolls, reviews of Busoni's performances, and the one surviving acoustic disc recording, as well as Busoni's writings about piano playing and his didactic editions and compositions. The author thus addresses Busoni's interpretive and technical approaches from many different angles. He covers Busoni's development as an artist in chapters 1-3, concert programming in chapter 5, technique and interpretive style in chapters 4 and 6-14, and connections between Busoni's playing, aesthetics, and culture in the four concluding chapters.

Kogan mentions textual alterations of Busoni's that might have distracted scholars from probing deeper into the mechanism of his playing in chapters 6-7. He also discusses minor note changes in Busoni's piano roll of Liszt's Concert Paraphrase of Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto for piano, S. 434, in chapter 10, documenting them with notated examples. Kogan connects Busoni's textual alterations with his aesthetics, which conflated practices of performance and composition. He considers the merits of many of the changes: "achievements that knocked the ground from under the 'literalists' . . . [and] moments, when it seems that his genius suggested to him something better than what was in the original" (p. 29). He notes some of the less successful attempts as well, which he attributes to Busoni's lesser spiritual connection with certain composers or his own human inconsistency (pp. 30-31).

Yet Kogan hardly limits himself to considering Busoni's textual alterations. He also explores Busoni's technique and interpretive style—aspects of Busoni's pianism that have been less discussed in scholarship. Kogan specifically covers such topics as articulation, dynamics, tempo, rhythm, fingering, pedaling, and expression through analyses of Busoni's writings, music editions, compositions, concert reviews, and piano rolls. The author maintains that although Busoni used a variety of approaches at the piano, he favored a non-legato touch, which he considered to be natural or organic to the percussive piano. He also used sudden (rather than gradual) shifts of dynamics or tempo. Often criticized for being too cerebral, Busoni was quite a scholar, conducting research on the composers and compositions...