Busoni - Elegies, Toccata, etc review | Andrew Clements's classical album of the week

The Guardian 0

Peter Donohoe
(Chandos)
With music that demands immense virtuosity, Peter Donohoe meets each challenge fearlessly

It’s now almost a century since Ferruccio Busoni died, yet fixing him into the history of early 20th-century music gets no easier. Fifty years ago Busoni was regularly included in surveys of musical modernism; never as a mainstream figure, but as one of its intriguing, forward-looking peripheral figures. Now, though, he seems more like a survivor of 19th-century romanticism, whose writings may have anticipated later developments in music, but with works that rarely delivered on their radical promise. With the exception of a handful of his Bach transcriptions, none of Busoni’s works could be regarded now as repertory pieces.