Busoni: Brautwahl Suite; Geharnischte Suite
Orchestre Philharmonique de Timişoara; Jean-François Antonioli, conductor.
Timpani 1C1054.
Ferruccio Busoni remains one of those composers whose reputation rests more on what he might have achieved than on what most of us have actually heard. This disc—featuring the Brautwahl Suite and Geharnischte Suite, both premiere recordings when issued—offers a chance to really reckon with the orchestral Busoni, not just the pianistic legend or the theoretical provocateur.
The Brautwahl Suite salvages music from Busoni’s 1912 opera Die Brautwahl, which managed a mere six performances in Hamburg before disappearing. Smart move on his part. The five-movement suite, premiered in Berlin with Oskar Fried in 1913, preserves some genuinely vivid invention. “Ghostly Music” opens with the sort of spectral orchestration that does indeed recall early German Expressionism—there’s Dukas in the harmonic palette, Berlioz in the instrumental color, even a whiff of Mahler’s First Symphony in the way string textures suddenly thin to transparency. But Busoni isn’t simply derivative here. He has his own voice, even if it took him half a career to find it.
“Lyric Music” treads a dangerous line. Over barely audible pizzicato, the string melody hovers on the edge of sentiment without—quite—tumbling into kitsch. I kept thinking of Schreker, that other master of perfumed late Romanticism, though Busoni maintains a certain Italianate restraint. The “Mystic Piece” goes full druidic: Isle of the Dead meets Ireland’s Forgotten Rite (they’re exactly contemporaneous, as it happens), with shadows of Ravel’s La valse lurking in the orchestral mists. “Hebrew Music” alternates between rabbinical gravity and something more emotionally unmoored—the brass writing here is wonderfully acrid, cutting through the Faustian atmosphere. The "finale", “Joyous Music,” provides the necessary release: a toboggan ride of a movement that flits and darts with Hungarian inflections that anticipate Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra by three decades.
The Geharnischte Suite—“The Armoured Suite“—dates from Busoni’s Finnish period (1888–90) when he was running with Sibelius’s crowd. Each movement carries a dedication to friends of “Lesko,” Busoni’s dog. (There’s a photograph in the booklet. The dog looks skeptical.) The four movements honor Sibelius himself, the playwright Adolf Paul, Armas Järnefelt, and his brother Eero. Despite the martial title—all shivered lances and destriers, like Elgar’s Froissart—much of the music is surprisingly light, even galant. The opening movement has more French elegance than Lutheran severity.
But the “Grabdenkmal” (Monument) third movement turns serious: Sibelian swirls from the First Symphony and Kullervo, Brucknerian brass surges, even a touch of Havergal Brian’s processional grandeur. The "finale", “Ansturm” (Assault), lives up to its name—bellicose as Szymanowski’s Concert Overture, cheeky as Schwanda. There’s a remarkable hushed interlude midway through, strings floating over the lightest brass staccato, that has nothing to do with military assault and everything to do with the sort of wood magic Busoni absorbed in Finland.
The Timişoara Orchestra under Jean-François Antonioli delivers clean, committed performances. String luxuriance? Not quite at the level this music ideally demands. A certain fluency occasionally eludes them—corners get turned a bit squarely in the Brautwahl "finale". But nothing here offends, and the brass section deserves special mention for their dry, focused articulation in the “Hebrew Music.”
This disc matters. It illuminates a corner of the repertoire that most of us have simply never explored, and it makes a case—not definitive, perhaps, but persuasive—that Busoni’s orchestral music deserves more than footnote status in the late Romantic canon.
Richard Dyer
