Word: busoni
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...Busoni: Sonata No. 2 (Richard Burgin, violin; Edward Weiss, piano; Circle). A massive and powerful work that seems younger than its 53 years. It is free of the flowery passage work of Busoni's famous piano transcriptions, but never dissonant in the modern sense. It is excellently performed by the Boston Symphony's concertmaster and a pupil of the composer...
...minded conductor of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony, has become the hero of Manhattan's modernists and the bane of its musical conservatives. In four years, he has introduced new symphonic works by such radicals as Schoenberg, Schnabel and Sessions, and such theater works (in concert form) as Busoni's Arlecchino and Berg's Wozzeck. Last week he was at it again: he conducted the first U.S. performance of Darius Milhaud's opera Christopher Columbus...
...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...