When his parents named him Ferruccio Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto Busoni, clearly they had high expectations for their boy. These expectations were more than fulfilled, when he went on to become one of the outstanding pianists of his day, a brilliant intellectual, and an influential teacher. He also composed what may be the most grandiose piano concerto of all time.
Join me this afternoon on The Classical Network to hear Busoni’s magnum opus. The five-movement concerto, written in 1904, when the composer was 38, spans over 70 minutes and concludes with a male chorus. Chamber music it is not!
The apotheosis is a setting of a lofty text lifted from the verse drama “Aladdin,” by the Danish playwright Adam Oehlenschläger. By contrast, there are passages in the fourth movement, of much earthier stuff, that barely skirt self-parody, conjuring the specter of Chico Marx.
There was no way I would have been able to present this piece yesterday, Busoni’s birthday, during afternoon drive time, and reasonably expect to fit much else; but a Tuesday mid-afternoon is ideal for such an epic journey. The pianist will be Garrick Ohlsson, whose birthday it is tomorrow. Expect the concerto to commence around 2 p.m. EDT.
We’ll follow that with one of Richard Strauss’ lesser-heard works, the ambitious symphonic fantasy “Aus Italien” (“From Italy”), from 1886. When Strauss, at 22 years-old, employed what he believed to be a traditional Italian melody in the fantasy’s finale, he suddenly found himself the target of a lawsuit. The Neapolitan song “Funiculì, Funiculà” had been composed in celebration of a funicular cable car that was used to convey passengers up and down Mount Vesuvius – before it was predictably destroyed in an eruption in 1944. The song was composed in 1880 by Luigi Denza (music) and Peppino Turco (lyrics). It became a huge international hit and sold over a million copies. Poor Strauss. He wound up having to pay a royalty fee every time “Aus Italien” was performed.
We’ll begin our sojourn with today’s Noontime Concert, which will feature The Dryden Ensemble in a program titled “Queen Christina Goes to Rome.” The musical selections were chosen to mirror the unorthodox Swedish queen’s journey from Stockholm via Innsbruck to Italy, with excursions to Paris and Hamburg. Composers will include Dietrich Buxtehude, Louis Couperin, Arcangelo Corelli, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, among others.
The free-spirited queen scandalized her contemporaries by dressing as a man and refusing to marry. Equally confounding was her abdication at the age of 28, trading her throne for a life of music, art, and religion in Rome. The concert will feature actors Roberta Maxwell as Christina and Paul Hecht as the narrator, in dramatic readings from the letters and diaries of the queen and other historical figures. The program and script were assembled by Dryden artistic director Jane McKinley.
The Dryden Ensemble’s next set of concerts will take place this weekend. “Musica Stravagante” will include works for oboe and strings by German and Italian masters, including Tomaso Albinoni, Johann Sebastian Bach, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, and Antonio Vivaldi, again among others. The program will be presented twice, on Saturday at 7:30 p.m., at Trinity Episcopal Church in Solebury (outside New Hope, PA), and on Sunday at 3 p.m., at Princeton Theological Seminary’s Miller Chapel. For more information, visit drydenensemble.org.
I hope you’ll join me today in getting a “kick” out of music from the Apennine Peninsula, from 12 to 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
Clockwise from left: The Apennine “boot;” Garbo as Queen Christina; a Vesuvian funicular car; Ferruccio Busoni enjoying a cigar
