Decades can pass without an opportunity to hear a live performance of Ferrucio Busoni’s pantheistic 1904 piano concerto. At 75 minutes in length, the ferocious five-movement monster is a taxing play and an equally taxing listen. It requires heroic stamina from the musicians, and no small financial outlay by an orchestra on both a soloist and a chorus. The extravagance does not end there, since the concerto itself is prodigal in its utopian ambition and difficulty.
But here, in the centenary of the composer’s death, was the concerto’s second London outing in less than four months. Compared with the Albert Hall, where Benjamin Grosvenor and Edward Gardner powered through Busoni’s score in this summer’s Proms, the drier acoustic of the Barbican Hall provided a more clinical sound. There was no opportunity either, unlike in the Albert Hall, for the male chorus to remain invisible as they sang the work’s serenely effective setting of the Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger’s mystical verses.
For immediacy and concentration, however, the Barbican won hands down. It also sported the formidable Kirill Gerstein, who delivered what is sometimes dubbed an almost unplayable solo part – the piano writing stuffed with thundering arpeggios, glittering octave runs and earth-shaking bass chords – with something as close to total authority as one is likely to hear.
With Sakari Oramo fearlessly moving things along from the podium, the work’s excesses gained something approaching coherence. The 20-minute central movement was the arch that held the structure together. Hearing it for the second time in a short period highlighted more of the unities that bind the concerto’s associative and over-the-top vastness, in which the soloist is more a fellow explorer with the orchestra than a traditional concerto protagonist in his or her own right.
Oramo prefaced the Busoni with another distinctive rarity close to his heart. But what a contrast in every way. Grażyna Bacewicz’s second symphony from 1951 is an energetic and thoroughly professional score. It exhibits all the taut neo-classical discipline that Busoni so spectacularly spurns. Nevertheless, the snare drum, clarinet and oboe all peeped fragmentarily through the busy surface brightness of Bacewicz’s score to tell of darker depths beneath.
