SOLO PIANO WORKS BY FERRUCIO BUSONI AND ROMAN VLAD with Carlo Grante

Description

Bach-Vlad: “Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein” Chorale; Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) Fantasia Contrappuntistica: Roman Vlad (1919-) Opus Triplex [comp. 2001-2005]. DDD. Total time: 76:21’’ UPC#017685-11862-3

Buzz: In the Fantasia Contrappuntistica, his magnum opus, Busoni brought together the many sides of his creative personality—scholarship, craftsmanship, occult visions, irrational abstraction—in an experimental idiom aimed at realizing both his intellectual aspirations and his near-mystical musical visions. His point of departure was Bach, though he did not advocate the “back to Bach” veneration of, say, Reger, or seek devotedly a magister in absentia. For him, rather, Bach was the focus of the Western musical canon, and he saw in The Art of Fugue, especially, a spiritual bequest to posterity—and to himself. Commissioned and premiered by Carlo Grante, Roman Vlad’s Opus Triplex is a triptych based on the BACHmotif, and the result of lengthy, deep analysis of the many potentialities of that particular melogram, which Vlad uses as a building-block to create sonic complexes, in light of his own dodecaphonic experience both as a composer and as a scholar of the music of the twentieth century.

Carlo Grante is one of the most active and accomplished recording artists of his generation. His concert activity, which has brought him to great acclaim to the great major music centers of the world and as soloist with major orchestras, features a wide array of repertoire that includes also many works of the present day. In March 2006 he performed Busoni’s monumental Piano Concerto with the Accademia Santa Cecilia Orchestra and Chorus under Fabio Luisi. He has been recording the complete solo piano works of Godowsky for Music & Arts. Grante’s past teachers have been S. Perticaroli, I. Davis, R. Firkusny and A. Kezedadze-Pogorelich.