My family are avid walkers. Every holiday I can remember there has been an ambitious hike of some kind. Last summer my parents conquered Ben Nevis with my elder brother, who has Down’s syndrome, and we were all particularly proud of his achievement.
No muddy walking boots for me yet this year though. My own challenge has been a mountain of a more horizontal nature: that of the piano keyboard and Busoni’s monumental Piano Concerto. Often referred to as the “Everest” or the “skyscraper” concerto, it is a piece of such hyper-virtuosic pianistic demands that few play it, or are mad enough it take it on.
A five-movement work 70 minutes in length, this monster by the Italian composer – who died 100 years ago this month – is an extraordinary musical journey for solo piano with massive orchestration and a male-voice choir, silent until the final movement. The involvement of the chorus – which Busoni stipulates should be invisible – elevates the work’s legendary status in the repertoire even further.
More than 120 musicians must come together to perform the work, making it a piece which demands venues that fit its proportions. Earlier this year, I travelled to Iceland to perform it in Reykjavik’s stunning Harpa concert hall, where a volcano was erupting nearby in the dramatic arctic winds of dark winter, and a few weeks later to Berlin, where Busoni himself debuted the work, for my own debut at the Berlin Philharmonie with Robin Ticciati on the podium – who himself has family links to Busoni. And next week I’m bringing it to the BBC Proms – with the London Philharmonic and Edward Gardner. It will be 36 years to the day since it was last performed at this festival in the Royal Albert Hall, and I can’t think of a better space to play it in – especially since Sir Henry Wood himself was such a personal champion of the composer.
Busoni thought of the work as his “Italian symphony” with quotations from Neapolitan songs, Italian dance forms and vivid directions in his native tongue. But the influences are much more complex than this: you can detect the shadows of Brahms, Liszt, Bach and Chopin among others, perhaps even Wagner, intentionally or inadvertently. Busoni’s inspirations for the concerto also include classical architecture, nature and quasi-Egyptian iconography, and he uses for the choir’s text a German translation of a Danish play about Aladdin in praise of Allah. Such are the enormous contradictions and fascinatingly diverse strands of this unique piece of music. And all this is very much a reflection of the man himself.
Busoni was a trailblazer pianist and is one of my heroes. Emerging from the long shadow of Liszt, he was the ultimate cosmopolitan – an Italian who lived in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Russia, Finland and the US. A visionary, this straddler of the 19th and 20th centuries (born in 1866, he died in 1924) recomposed Bach for the modern piano, wrote an incredibly diverse body of music and speculated broadly about music and its future, predicting electronic music and microtonality. He said of the Piano Concerto: “I endeavoured … to gather together the results of my first period of manhood, and it represents the actual conclusion of it.”
I’ve played dozens of concerti, but there’s something different about this one. It’s perhaps best to think of it as a kind of operatic-symphony, where the piano is the central character in the drama. It is structured on a truly large scale. Themes and rhythmic motifs connect the five movements, the final one brings the most important strands together. The role of the pianist is frequently heroic, as we might expect, but it is multi-faceted: sometimes the orchestra has the principal themes; the piano takes the spotlight and then moves out of it; it blazes, comments, transitions, dreams; sometimes supporting the orchestra by laying down delicate blankets of notes or thick carpets of sound. At the piano you have to be acutely aware of coordination with the conductor and the orchestra, despite the difficulties of the piano part. It is like chamber music on a gargantuan, truly maximalist scale. Sometimes you are going full throttle at the keyboard but are fully absorbed in the orchestral sound. It can be frustrating (or a relief!) but it’s all part of the show.
Some passages border on physical impossibility. Take this example. A set of thick chords requiring various different hand positions, travelling irregularly in different directions in each hand, presto e forte possible (as fast and as loud as possible, in an impetuous tempo thrown at you by the orchestra). To be executed in the 60th minute!
Busoni drew his own image of the piece that visualises its journey. The first, third and fifth movements are represented by architecture: Greco-Roman, Egyptian and Babylonian. The more overtly Italianate second and fourth movements, by nature. For the first movement we see a magnificent temple with the sun rising behind it, an image encapsulated in the bold C-major entry of the piano. A large statue looms mysteriously in the darkness within. The second movement is represented by a fantastical bird rising out of flowers – this image is instantly recognisable in the wash of colour and the fluttering, rising figures that open the movement.
The substantial third movement is processional, ceremonial and quasi-religious. A flaming torch invites us into a tomb or temple, a sphinx keeps guard outside. The climax of the central section is imposing and terrifying, as if – as in a scene from Indiana Jones – an earthquake threatens to crumble and collapse the temple around you.
The fourth movement is my favourite. Cypress trees are shadowed by an erupting volcano. It is a tarantella – an Italian folk dance where the protagonist is bitten by a spider and dances to the death. If normally it is a dance to the death, here it is a dance to the end of the world, or rather to a Bacchanalian end of civilisation. The music becomes increasingly feverish, more and more bombastic. The orgiastic excesses border on the ridiculous, like an immense parody, and there are moments that are simply funny. It culminates with the cadenza to end all cadenzas – an erupting volcano – with orchestral interjections daring the pianist into even higher-stake feats of virtuosity (the passage shown above) and a final unexpected, heroic blast of C major, harking back to the very first piano entry.
Dissolving into darkness, the fifth movement begins with a transitional passage that slowly invites us into a cave or tomb, where flickering semiquavers conjure images of torchlight on the walls. Then, the sublime. The stark contrast that the entrance of the choir presents after the hedonism of the tarantella is what makes it so affecting and memorable. The final movement is a tomb with a wreath on the door. A winged figure outside represents mysticism in nature. The images now overlap – the volcano still looms overhead. The tomb is sealed.
Busoni writes in the score at the beginning of the fifth movement a quote from Oehlenschläger’s Aladdin play: “Low and soft the pillars of rock begin to sound.” At this moment in the play, Aladdin returns the lamp to the cave, and the cave around him begins to sing. The choir praise Allah and his works; the enduring achievements of ancient civilisations. As the pianist in this moment you feel an enormous sense of relief. The male voices become the protagonist and the piano recedes into the orchestra; most of your work is done. The very walls of the room you are in begin to reverberate with music.
Given the chaos of our times, this mammoth work speaks to us in myriad ways and offers something for everyone within its great dramatic landscape: heroism, despair, confusion, extreme joy and ultimately – renewal. And for the best possible view of this musical Everest – well, you just have to experience it for yourself.