MEMETERIA by Thomas May

“Because it’s there” might not provide sufficient motivation to motivate the rewiring and firing of countless synapses necessary to tackle the wild behemoth that is Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto. Nor to organize the expanded orchestra plus choir of low voices that adds to the expense for a program decidedly unfamiliar to most audiences.

But it’s exactly the sort of challenge to appeal to Igor Levit and Esa-Pekka Salonen, who are both avowed fans of Busoni’s anomalous contribution to the piano concerto repertoire. Because of schedule conflicts, I was able only to experience their interpretation in the dress rehearsal on Thursday morning before the first performance that evening of this week’s subscription concerts. (Additional performances are on Saturday evening (24 June) and Sunday afternoon (25 June) — if you happen to be in the Bay Area, I can’t recommend this rarity highly enough. Do not miss!

Because of Busoni’s idiosyncratic fusion of German and Italian influences, I tend to think of Busoni as a character invented by Thomas Mann. His work suggests a Faustian striving to synthesize the contrapuntal complexity of Bach with classical grace, the stern discipline of the North with the fantasy and insatiable curiosity of Da Vinci — like Bach, one of his key inspirations. (Did the music-obsessed Thomas Mann in fact actually encounter Busoni in concert in his guise as a powerhouse pianist? What did he think of Busoni’s own treatment of Faust in his remarkable opera — for which the composer penned his own libretto — which premiered in Dresden in 1925?)

There’s even a Faustian aspect to the Piano Concerto — not only (and most obviously) in its choral apotheosis, but in its bold motley of crazy contrasts. The piece plays with Romantic clichés of diabolical, indeed possessed, virtuosity but also draws from the poetic tenderness of Chopin, the rigor of Brahms, the mysteries of Bayreuth, the kaleidoscopic soundscapes of Busoni’s contemporary, Mahler (who led the world premiere of his gorgeous Berceuse élégiaque on his final concert in New York in 1911) — only to veer into cartoonish Rossini-land, with some seasonings from Italian folk song.

Busoni composed his Piano Concerto from 1901 to 1904 and played the solo part in the world premiere on 10 November 1904 with the Berlin Philharmonic under Karl Muck (Busoni had settled in Berlin a decade before. –earlier in 1904, incidentally, he had undertaken a concert tour of the US). As James Keller points out in his program note, the composer described the work-in-progress in a letter to his wife with this commentary, accompanied by a sketch:

The enclosed drawing is crude and clumsy, but not ridiculous. . . . It is the idea of my piano concerto in one picture and it is represented by architecture, landscape, and symbolism. The three buildings are the first, third, and fifth movements. In between come the two “lively” ones, Scherzo and Tarantella: the first represented by a miraculous flower and birds, freaks of nature; the second by Vesuvius and cypress trees. The sun rises over the entrance; a seal is fastened to the door of the building. The winged being right at the end is taken from Oehlenschläger’s chorus and represents mysticism in nature.

One of the big challenges for a conductor is how to make all these elements cohere. But Salonen is clearly not only at home with Busoni’s overarching architectural concept of the 75-minute, five-movement score, but understands how to make the transitions between episodes that on the surface seem almost arbitrary — while at the same time relishing the delight and astonishment they bring. Even with a requisite intermission interpolated before the choral finale during the dress rehearsal,  the Piano Concerto’s ability to draw us into a world of its own was apparent.

As for the piano soloist, Busoni has created a genuinely Shakespeare-sized role. Levit has made it his own. I was surprised to learn that he actually first took it on at the age of 18. At Davies Hall, he occasionally flexed and sipped from his water bottles and seemed surprisingly at ease — this was, after all, just hours before opening night — but remained intensely focused on the minutest detail.

The opening movement was magisterial, the stuff of great oratory, but Levit could tame his gigantic sound on a dime to produce wondrously hushed arpeggios that seemed a portal to another universe. The enormous, complex, multi-movement central movement fascinated me the most — above all, Busoni’s ability to transform the simplest, most mundane of gestures into a solemn utopia of lofty poetry. It inspired Levit’s signature depth of thoughtful concentration (the dagger-eyes he shot as some careless cell phone noise intruded were beyond deadly), which comes across on his recordings but really needs to be experienced live.

The piece frequently brought to mind a compact opera filled with interludes and comic relief, particularly in the madcap frenzy of the fourth-movement tarantella — really, an immense satire of the idea of the tarantella that approaches postmodern irony. Busoni in fact conceived writing a music drama based on the Danish poet and playwright Adam Oehlenschläger’s play Aladdin, or the Wonderful Lamp from 1805 but decided to set an extract titled “Hymn to Allah” as the choral movement that concludes the Piano Concerto.

Summing up his admiration of Busoni, Levit remarked in a recent interview with the New York Times: “Busoni has always been one of those role models I never met, in a way like an idol figure, regarding the way he thought and especially wrote about music, his utopian idea about what free music actually is, his idea about what the creator’s job is, which is to set up your own rules and not follow the rules of others. As a composer, as a pianist, as a thinker, teacher, we are speaking here of one of the most incredible minds of at least the 20th century. He was this larger-than-life figure, and I think it’s a larger-than-life piano concerto.”

To quote Busoni’s credo as formulated in his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music from 1907: “Music was born free and to win freedom is its destiny.”

Text from Adam Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin

V. Cantico

Die Felsensäulen fangen an tief und leise zu ertönen

Hebt zu der ewigen Kraft eure Herzen;
Fühlet euch Allah nah’, schaut seine Tat!
Wechseln im Erdenlicht Freuden und Schmerzen;
Ruhig hier stehen die Pfeiler der Welt.
Tausend und Tausend und abermals tausende
Jahre so ruhig wie jetzt in der Kraft,
Blitzen gediegen mit Glanz und mit Festigkeit,
Die Unverwüstlichkeit stellen sie dar.

Herzen erglüheten, Herzen erkalteten,
Spielend umwechselten Leben und Tod.
Aber in ruhigen Harren sie dehnten sich
Herrlich, kräftiglich, früh so wie spät.
Hebt zu der ewigen Kraft eure Herzen
Fühlet euch Allah nah’, schaut seine Tat!
Vollends belebet ist jetzo die tote Welt.
Preisend die Göttlichkeit, schweigt das Gedicht!

Translation by Noam Cook:

Low and Soft the Stone Columns Begin to Resound 

Raise up your hearts to the eternal force;
sense the closeness of Allah, behold his deeds!
Joy and grief alternate in earthly light;
while the pillars of the world stand in repose.  
Thousands upon thousands upon thousands
of years, as calm in their force as now,
flash sedately by with radiance and steadiness,
representing the irrepressible.

Hearts glowed, hearts grew cold,
playfully life and death alternate.
Yet waiting quietly they persist
blissfully, forcefully, both early and late.
Raise up your hearts to the eternal force
sense the closeness of Allah, behold his deeds!
Now the inanimate world is enlivened fully.
Praising the divine, the poem is silent!

Filed under: Esa-Pekka Salonen, pianists, San Francisco Symphony