Busoni: Late Piano Music

Marc-André Hamelin (piano)

Marc-André Hamelin is indisputably the king of Busoni pianists. He triumphantly masters the extraordinary technical difficulties and contrapuntal complexities this composer presents. This generously priced triple album offers most of Busoni’s mature works and the widest selection of pieces from the Klavierübung so far recorded, many of them for the first time.

(Studio Master: Please note that the recording of the Fantasia after J S Bach included here is taken from Marc-André Hamelin's 1998 album 'The Composer-Pianists' and has been up-sampled to 24-bit 96 kHz.)

Busoni:
 Elegies, BV249
 Nuit de Noël
 Fantasia nach J S Bach
 Canonic Variations and Fugue, BVB40 after J.S. Bach BWV1079 
 Giga, Bolero e Variazione (1909) from An die Jugend
 Sonatina Seconda (1912)
 Sonatina, BV257
 Sonatina No. 3: ad usum infantis
 Sonatina No. 5: in diem nativitatis Christi MCMXVII
 Sonatina brevis 'in signo Joannis Sebastiani Magni' BV280
 Sonatina No. 6 (Chamber Fantasy on Themes from Bizet's Carmen)
 Indianisches Erntelied
 Indianische Tagebuch, Book 1 (Indian Diary), K 267
 Albumblätter, K289 - Berlin
 Toccata 'Preludio, Fantasia, Ciaccona' BV287
 Prologo, BV279
 Klavierübung, 1925
 Nine Variations on Chopin Prelude in C minor, Op. 22
 Seven Short Pieces for the Cultivation of Polyphonic Playing BV296
 Perpetuum mobile
 Prelude & Etude en arpeges

"Such strangeness demands rare skill and a special empathy for an idiom which for many will seem recondite and remote. And it is in this sense that Hamelin, playing with unfaltering lucidity and authority, achieves an astonishing triumph even by his exalted standards...although this is essentially an album for specialists, it is one that could never be bettered."
Gramophone Magazine - November 2013

"The performances...are all you could hope from a player of such quality, faced with repertoire he might have been born to interpret. This is playing of a very high order, such as...one seldom hears. Hamelin is well-nigh ideal in sensitivity of phrasing, clarity of tone and delineation of voices...A fabulous set, almost beyond praise."
BBC Music Magazine - January 2014 *****