Busoni as Pianist (Eastman Studies in Music) Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is a treat for Busoni lovers in the English speaking world. The musical and technical examples plus fingerings demonstrate Busoni's autodidactic accomplishments in all their peculiarities. The reviews of his performances in Russia have to my knowledge never appeared before in any other published books or articles. As such they are an essential addition to this literature. The translator, for whom this enterprise is an obvious labor of love, makes apologies for the author, mr. Kogan, who apparently had to frame Busoni's contributions and liabilities in a somewhat Marxist manner, (which even contemporary Marxists would describe as 'vulgar'.) Without getting into detail, the notion of labeling Busoni as a 'realist' is utter nonsense. By example, he fought against realism in the theater in a way which cannot be misinterpreted. What 'realism' in instrumental music could possibly be can only be answered by those who had to live in the Soviet Union. The rest of us will naturally roll our eyes.
The book is not seriously compromised by this aspect; like the translator suggests, you can bracket those remarks and set them aside. The problem essentially is that mr. Kogan seems never to have heard Busoni play. He's limited to trying to reconstruct a picture of Busoni's pianistic address second hand. This leads to a decidedly partial view of the master's playing that leads the listener/reader to possibly think he knows more than he really does.
For instance, Russian reviews lead mr. Kogan to believe that Busoni did not command a real triple forte, the kind that Hofmann, Rosenthal or in our own day, Volodos can produce. Yet Bonavia wrote, "Busoni commanded a wider range of tone than any living pianist..it led him to a tone which can only be called 'white, a quality that was cold and almost inanimate... from this perfectly even basis he would start and build up a climax that reached the extreme limit of what is possible to a pianist, an avalanche of sound giving the impression of a red flame rising out of marble.." This doesn't sound like someone (like perhaps Glenn Gould) who flinched from exhibiting power at the keyboard. This is just one example that demonstrates the phenomenological limitations that Kogan is up against.
This is a greater and more pertinent deficiency than the ideological nonsense that made this publication possible in the Soviet Union. Moreover I'm not convinced that Kogan is familiar with Dr. Faust, the magnum opus that Busoni was aiming at almost all his adult life. He hardly mentions it, which is like appraising Tchaikovsky while omitting the 6th symphony. Having said all this, it would be easy to believe that I'm panning this book. Actually there is much of great value that you can't get even from Sitsky's 'Busoni and the Piano.' So if you're interested in the phenomenon that was Ferruccio Busoni, this should in any case be in your library. -- Geoffrey Dorfman

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Ferruccio Busoni is most widely known today as the composer of such works as the Second Violin Sonata, the incidental music for Gozzi's Turandot, and the most monumental piano concerto in the repertory (some 80 minutes long, with male chorus in the finale). But Busoni was also renowned in his day as an author and pedagogue and, most especially, as a pianist. Busoni's recordings of pieces by Chopin and Liszt--and of his own arrangements of keyboard works by Bach and Beethoven--are much prized and studied today by connoisseurs of piano playing. Yet even his most important biographers have cast only a cursory glance at the pianistic aspect of Busoni's fascinating career. Grigory Kogan's book Busoni as Pianist (published in Russian in 1964, and here translated for the first time) was and remains the first and only study to concentrate exclusively on Busoni's contributions to the world of the piano. Busoni as Pianist summarizes reviews of Busoni's playing and Busoni's own writings on the subject. It also closely analyzes the surviving piano rolls and recordings, and examines Busoni's editions, arrangements, and pedagogical output. As such, it will be of interest to pianists, teachers and students of the piano, historians, and all who love piano music and the art of piano playing. Grigory Kogan (1901-79) was a leading Soviet pianist and music critic. A conservatory professor at the age of twenty-one, Kogan created the first-ever course in Russia dealing with the history and theory of pianism. Through his brilliant lectures, his concert performances, and his many books, articles, and reviews, Kogan influenced an entire generation of Soviet pianists.

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