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.
