Interview, Kirill Gerstein on Busoni

Clocking in at around 70 minutes and scored for a huge orchestra and (in the final movement) male chorus, Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto is one of the longest in the repertoire, and remains a comparative rarity in the concert-hall. Earlier this month I spoke to pianist Kirill Gerstein (the soloist on a new recording from the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo, due out on Myrios later this week) about why there’s far more to the piece than its unusual size, and his perception of the composer as ‘a link between the nineteenth-century grand virtuoso Romantic tradition and the beginnings of musical modernism’.

Because of the logistical challenges posed by the scale of this piece, opportunities to perform it are few and far between – at what stage did you take it into your repertoire?

I’ve had this attraction to Busoni ever since I was 10 or 11: I was given a marvellous book by my piano teacher in the Soviet Union at a time when literature about him was few and far between. I remember being completely seized by this personality, and I think that feeling has remained with me ever since. That’s when I first became aware of the concerto, but it wasn’t until I came to the US that I got to know it through the John Ogdon recording from 1966 as well as the Garrick Ohlsson one from 1989. It’s always been on the horizon of things that I wanted to learn - or rather hope that I could, because it’s a monumental challenge and I didn’t feel it was a given that I could even play the piece. Also it is not the kind of thing that you just work on in your spare time!

I’d discussed Busoni with Anthony Fogg (the artist administrator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) over a period of several years, and then one very fine day he called me and said: ‘OK, let’s programme the Concerto’. The next question was who should conduct it, and very quickly I thought of Sakari Oramo, who I knew had already done the piece – Finnish musicians have a particular affinity for Busoni, because early on in his teaching career he lived in Helsinki and Sibelius considered him his mentor over a period of two decades. In fact the first time that Sibelius’s music was heard in Germany was in a series of concerts of modern music which Busoni put on in Berlin over a period of seven or eight years, hiring the Berliner Philharmoniker with his own money; that was the first time that some of Elgar’s music (including The Dream of Gerontius) was programmed in Germany, as well as works by Debussy, Richard Strauss, Sibelius and Bartók, and the Busoni Piano Concerto itself.

It’s really a symphony with piano obbligato; Brahms’s concertos were often referred to as symphonic works with a significant piano part, and the Busoni concerto is even more extreme in that all of the musical processes and transformations happen in the orchestra. And the pianist is Busoni himself, commenting on the proceedings and elaborating upon them in the most luxurious and sometimes technically challenging way. All of that means that you really need a symphonic conductor, because it’s not a concerto that is driven from the piano – and Sakari really is one of the great symphonic conductors. I would describe it as a Mahler-esque symphony, but with an Italianate flavour. Indeed in his later years Busoni used to refer to it as his ‘Italian symphony’.

Scriabin’s Prometheus, which you recorded last year, was composed at around the same time, and also makes use of a choir – do the parallels between the two works go deeper than that?

I think yes and no: yes in the sense that both works attempt to create a musical universe (which is also very true of the Mahler symphonies), and pianistically perhaps there are some similarities, though the Busoni is much more elaborate. Perhaps Busoni’s later music is more parallel to Scriabin’s – this concerto certainly has forward-looking ideas, but also it’s really the summation of the nineteenth-century piano concerto. He was in his late thirties at this point, and before embarking on his next period (which was more modernist and revolutionary) he takes stock of everything that’s been accomplished in piano writing and in the genre of piano concerto up until that time…and then some! In terms of the use of the choir, the size, the scope, the many musical ideas and the use of folklore, he really summed up everything that he knew about - and he knew about pretty much everything! In that respect his music could be compared to James Joyce’s writing: it’s not eclectic, it’s simply that when most of Western cultural heritage is at your fingertips, you’re able to make references to everything as part of this huge scope and background, rather than actually merely borrowing or quoting material.

And they knew one another, I believe...?

Yes, the interesting thing with Busoni is that he’s still not recognised by the general public as the Renaissance Man-like personality that he was – he was really at the centre of cultural life for at least 25 years, at a very important period in European history. During his time in exile during World War One his social circle included Joyce, Stefan Zweig, Umberto Boccioni, and these people really exchanged ideas – they were far more than mere acquaintances. I’ve mentioned his importance to Sibelius, but there are also his influences on Schoenberg , Edgard Varèse and Kurt Weill; and looking backwards, he was a protégé of Brahms at one point, and also knew Liszt (in fact his mother studied with Liszt), so in a sense he’s a link between the nineteenth-century grand virtuoso Romantic tradition and the beginnings of musical modernism.

Speaking of Liszt, how much of an influence was he on Busoni’s keyboard writing, and how do the technical challenges which it presents measure up to those of Liszt's concertos?

I would answer that partly in Busoni’s own words: ‘Liszt is the tree-trunk, and we are all its branches’. I think it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that Liszt truly invented the modern way of writing for the piano, essentially within a span of twenty years (from mid-1830s to mid-1850s), and everything that has come since then is really either a direct use of Liszt’s pianistic devices or a further elaboration of what can be found in his piano writing. I think that absolutely holds true for Busoni, Ravel, Debussy, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, and pretty much anybody you can think of until later twentieth-century developments like clusters and other extended techniques. The new Thomas Adès concerto [which Gerstein will premiere in Boston early next month ] too has many Lisztian textures!

Busoni was one of the foremost Liszt scholars at a time when musical scholarship didn’t quite mean the same thing as it does now; at that stage a lot of Liszt’s works were unknown or still sitting in archives, often existing in different versions. Busoni became an expert editor of Liszt’s music, and I think he absorbed all of it and thought: ‘OK, if Liszt does this in a certain kind of arpeggio, then perhaps I can shift every second note to the left or to the right, so that sounds even more extravagant or virtuosic’. From a technical point of view, that’s often incredibly challenging: you’ll have a certain pattern under your hands from Chopin or Liszt, but with a twinkle in his eye Busoni changes one little thing and it’s a case of checkmate in two moves for the pianist’s habits!

It does strike me that there’s a lot of wit in the writing…

Absolutely. I think a lot of large-scale pieces have been done a disservice because of their sheer size and some of the vocabulary that’s been associated with that size: for a long time I had a misconception about Brahms’s Second Concerto because of adjectives like ‘monumental’ and ‘gigantic’, but in fact it’s much more chamber music-like and transparent than the first one! With Busoni, whilst of course it’s a conception on a truly grand scale, it has its unfolding logic, as well as a lot of wit especially in the second and fourth movements – the fourth is incredibly orgiastic, and the second is very sardonic. The third movement has been described by one writer as ‘the kind of music Liszt would have been writing had he lived much longer after Wagner’. You also have the first movement that’s a really symphonic opening, and you have the epilogue - so extensive though it is, it justifies itself, and in many ways invites the listener in. Of course it’s long, but so are Mahler’s symphonies!

I gather you’ve arranged something pretty special for the physical release of the album – can you tell me more?

I think a physical format release today has to go beyond simply containing the music, because the convenience of the digital distribution is clearly a fact to consider. I thought we should provide a rich background for Busoni and the concerto in particular, so the CD release includes an 88-page deluxe booklet with two articles which have been specifically commissioned. One is by the most important German writer on Busoni of the past 30 years, Albrecht Riethmüller, who contributed an essay on Busoni’s general scope of artistic accomplishment. The other article is by the most important English-speaking writer on the subject of Busoni’s piano music, Larry Sitsky, whose article is about the piano concerto in particular; There are also a number of rare or previously unpublished images and photographs, one of which shows the frontispiece of the score: Busoni described the first, third and fifth movements of the concerto as the more objective, architectural ones, and the second and the fourth as the ‘living’ movements, and all of that is illustrated in a very opulent drawing by Heinrich Vogeler, a famous German graphic artist of the time. I think you’ll have gathered from this conversation that Busoni is a project very dear to me, and the booklet that accompanies the physical release is something that I’m really very proud of.