Word: busoni
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust is demon masquerading as man; to round off his demonic repertory, New York City Opera General Director Julius Rudel is toying with the idea of producing Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust (in which Treigle would play yet another Mephistopheles) and Busoni's Doktor Faust (in which Treigle would switch roles and appear as Faust, leaving Mephisto to some diabolic tenor...
...rest of the program matched Madame Carmirelli's Romantic tastes. It included a modern Italian violin sonata and a piano-violin sonata by Ferruccio Busoni. The Busoni piece went smoothly, with thematic-seeming material floating by with all of the grace of the turn of the century. Someone once said of Busoni that "he was hopelessly ahead of his time when he was writing and is now hopelessly Romantic." That adequately describes his sonata. It probably says a lot about the program and the performance at the concert as well...
...Mozart, who liked a joke as much as anyone else, Dice Music consists of a waltz theme and a set of variations that are determined in a Cage-like manner, by rolling dice. In Hpschd, Cage embroidered the variations with snippets from works by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, Gottschalk, Busoni-even Cage. Each player had seven 20-minute chunks of music to choose from. Once having played, he was free to chat for a while with the listeners (who were given fluorescent plastic overalls to wear), then play the same chunk over again, or launch into another. Meanwhile, some 52 loudspeakers...
...standards, even Stravinsky and Bartok are somewhat old hat. "The tradition that I am upholding is the tradition of the continuance of music," he says. He has introduced new works by Milton Babbitt and Krzysztof Penderecki to the U.S., revived neglected ones by Charles Ives and Ferruccio Busoni. Zukofsky's 1968 recording of Roger Sessions' Violin Concerto proved that the music was not only playable, which many a violinist had denied, but that it was perhaps the finest concerto for the instrument ever produced by an American composer...
...made his first real study of the score. He has had plenty of experience. Trained in Berlin by Egon Petri, he played concerts in Europe for four years before moving to the U.S. in 1929. He has made five previous New York appearances, notably a 1966 performance of Busoni's challenging Piano Concerto. But now the magnitude of what he has undertaken overwhelms him. At a hotel, he recites "a prayer to Ludwig for help," and drops off to sleep...