Busoni Piano Music Volume 8 – Wolf Harden

Somewhere in the shadow of Chopin’s op. 28, most pianists lose their nerve. Busoni did not.

He was fifteen when he began the 24 Preludes, op. 37 — a boy already restless with received forms, already convinced that the piano could carry more freight than the salon allowed. That he chose Chopin’s key scheme, the circle of fifths alternating major and relative minor, tells you he wanted the comparison. It also tells you he wasn’t afraid of it. Few composers in their teens would risk inviting that particular ghost into the room.

Wolf Harden doesn’t shrink from the comparison either, and that’s the real news of this disc — the eighth installment, I gather, of Naxos’s long and admirable trawl through Busoni’s complete piano output, a series that has quietly become one of the more important documentary projects in the current catalogue, even if nobody’s throwing it a parade.

The preludes run longer than Chopin’s on average — nearly an hour for the cycle, some pieces stretching past four minutes where Chopin might dash off a thought in ninety seconds. That extra room lets the young Busoni wander, and wander he does: into Brahmsian thickets of sonority in the second prelude, an Andantino sostenuto that sounds like a Viennese intermezzo wandered onto Polish soil; into something gruffer, almost Beethovenian, in No. 13 in F-sharp; into the frank tread of dance rhythm in Nos. 4 and 5. No. 7 in A major has the lilt of a gigue filtered through some imagined harpsichord — Busoni already flirting, decades early, with the neo-Baroque manner that would eventually flower into the Fantasia contrappuntistica and those extraordinary Bach transcriptions and “realizations.” Counterpoint proper doesn’t dominate this set the way you’d expect from the man who would become classical music’s great contrapuntal obsessive, but No. 21 — tellingly the longest piece here — finally lets him show his hand, thick with imitative writing, before No. 22 turns that same contrapuntal impulse loose and playful.

Harden plays all this with a pianism that never calls attention to itself and yet misses nothing. Listen to what he does with No. 14, the Lento in E-flat minor — genuinely stormy, genuinely dark, voiced with a weight in the bass that never turns to sludge. Then, barely pausing for breath, he lightens instantly for No. 15 in D-flat, finding exactly the grace that piece needs, a kind of exhale. That pivot, dark to light in the space of a page turn, is where you measure a Busoni pianist. Harden measures up.

Technically the disc has its showpiece in No. 19 in E-flat — fleet, clean, no smearing in the passagework — but I was more taken, honestly, by the quieter successes: the charm Harden finds in No. 17, unforced, almost conversational, and the strange, late-Romantic glow he brings to the final prelude, No. 24, which to my ear tips toward early Impressionism, all those parallel sonorities catching light like a Debussy sketch avant la lettre. The annotator, Richard Whitehouse, hears Mendelssohn instead. I can hear his point — there’s a fleetness in the closing pages that could pass for the Songs Without Words — but I’ll stick with my Frenchmen.

The engineers have moved house for this volume, out of Potton Hall (where volumes three through six were made, going back to 2007) and into Wyastone Concert Hall in Monmouth. It suits him. The sound has warmth without blur, presence without spotlighting — you get the sense of a real room breathing around the instrument, pedal decay allowed to hang rather than being clipped by a close mic. It’s a more sympathetic acoustic for Busoni’s harmonic ambiguities than a drier hall would offer.

The Macchiette medioevali, op. 33, composed just a year or so before the preludes, are a different animal entirely — six brief medieval sketches, barely thirteen minutes total, closer to genre pieces than to the preludes’ expansive argument. They’re slighter, frankly, but they’re not throwaways; there’s a boy’s fascination here with archaism, with modal color, that would resurface transformed in the mature Busoni of the Doktor Faust years. Harden treats them with the right lightness of touch, never overselling their charm.

Is there a benchmark elsewhere for the 24 Preludes? Not really — this corner of Busoni’s catalogue has never been overrun with recordings, and that scarcity alone makes Harden’s advocacy valuable. But scarcity isn’t the only reason to recommend this disc. He plays with intelligence, with color, with a sense of where this odd, brilliant, not-yet-fully-formed composer was heading. Recommended, and warmly.