Apart from mounting a production of one of his rarely heard operas, there could have been no better way of marking the centenary of the death of Ferruccio Busoni this year than with a performance of his monumental Piano Concerto. The first challenge in planning such an event is tracking down someone willing to tackle the ferociously difficult solo part, but Benjamin Grosvenor relishes the kind of technical challenges Busoni’s music presents. With Edward Gardner conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Philharmonic and Rudolfus Choirs supplying the hidden chorus of male voices that Busoni adds to the finale, this performance of Busoni’s concerto, the first at the Proms since 1988, had all the ingredients for the kind of special occasion that the Proms can offer, but has seen too rarely in recent times.
Busoni can be a composer whose music delivers rather less than it promises, but the Piano Concerto is one of his works in which in their quirky over-the-top way all of the elements hang together. For all its extreme pianism, it is never a straightforward concerto in the grand romantic tradition; there are elements of that certainly, but elsewhere it seems more like a five-movement symphony, with the piano as an obligatory accessory, which moves in and out of focus as the arch-like structure unfolds.
There were moments in the Proms performance when the piano seemed less prominent than perhaps Busoni intended, and radio listeners might have caught more detail in both the solo and orchestral writing than the audience in the hall. Gardner made a brief pause for the orchestra to retune before the fourth movement, but the sense of the concerto as a seamless musical entity, bound together by the sheer profusion of its musical ideas, was always vivid. Grosvenor’s playing was heroically committed, whether in the more rhetorical exchanges of the opening movement, or the glitter of the fourth-movement tarantella, in which the LPO’s woodwind also excelled.
But neither conductor nor soloist could convincingly disguise all the unevenness of the music, when as so often with Busoni, passages of striking originality are mixed with music of four-square ordinariness. The sheer scale of the concerto and the immense skill needed to realise it made the performance special; but the case for Busoni in general and his Piano Concerto in particular remained unproved.
