Word: busoni
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cape leaped to the podium and began to orate: " 'Tis not for children, not for gods, this play; for understanding people 'tis designed . . ." Finally, Conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos appeared and gave the downbeat, and the perplexed audience settled down to the first U.S. performance of Ferruccio Busoni's "theatrical capriccio," Harlequin...
...Busoni, an Italian who spent much of his life in Berlin and was more famous as a pianist and pedagogue (and transcriber of Bach) than as a composer, wrote the libretto for Harlequin on a visit to the U.S. in 1915. He hung his sardonic and sometimes savage satire on romantic opera, World War I and man in general, on a framework of commedia dell'arte. Harlequin is Faust in evening clothes, and his suave cynicism corrodes everyone it touches-an old Dante-reading tailer, his young wife, Harlequin's own wife, her lover, a doctor...
Conductor Mitropoulos, who once studied composition with Busoni and as a result took up conducting, staged his concert version of the satire more for barks than bites-in fact, it fell just short of slapstick. He arranged his orchestra on two sides of the stage, so that his singers had all the freedom of movement they could...
...Remote Corners. For Violinist Szigeti, that has been the goal ever since he went to England as a young man and his work with Composer-Pianist Ferruccio Busoni caused "the scales to fall away from my eyes." He concentrates on trying to play a composer's music "from the inside out" instead of putting a "superficial" gloss on it. Though he has a reputation for struggling painfully to prepare every concert, he actually practices very little. Says Szigeti: "Visitors always seem to find me in my shirtsleeves when I have finished 25 minutes of practice, and think I have...
...personality of the original performer. There was Debussy playing some of his Preludes and his Children's Corner Suite; Saint-Saëns, Faure, Grieg, Scriabin, Falla, Granados, Richard Strauss and Mahler performing their own compositions on the piano. There were kings of the keyboard-DePachmann, Leschetizky, Busoni, D'Albert and famed Conductor-Pianist Arthur Nikisch -playing Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, and their own works...