Ferruccio Busoni
Ferruccio Busoni's Bach transcriptions give organ counterpoint the weight and colour of the concert grand, as in the joyous E-flat Prelude and Fugue. He also wrote large-scale piano, orchestral and stage works in a style that grew steadily more individual.
As pianist and thinker he treated every score as a fresh problem rather than a fixed text. The Bach-Busoni editions became a touchstone of late-Romantic keyboard rewriting, opulent and driven rather than merely faithful. His Piano Concerto stretches past an hour and calls for an offstage male chorus. Later pieces lean toward freer harmony and, in the Indian Fantasy, melodies drawn from North American tribal sources. Chamber music, cadenzas, essays on aesthetics and microtones, and the unfinished opera Doktor Faust sit beside the transcriptions through which many listeners still first meet his name.
Compositions by Ferruccio Busoni appear on
Life and Love
Cameron Roberts plays Johann Sebastian Bach at the piano, joining original keyboard works with his own arrangements and those of Busoni and Lipatti.