Ferruccio Busoni gave the first of three piano recitals at Beethoven Hall before a large sized and interested audience a week ago to-day. His Bach playing is really something phenomenal, and I rarely enjoyed a pianistic performance from an aural and brainal combination viewpoint, more than I did his interpretation of the C major toccata and fugue for organ, with its intermezzo adagio in Busoni's own masterly transcription for piano.
On the other hand, I was never more disappointed than I was with the artist's performance of the Beethoven C sharp minor Sonata. I don't belong among the listeners who want to be hypnotized by the "moonlight contained in this poetical work, but I don't care to be disturbed, either, by brutal oddities, which extravagant desire to be original at all costs may invent and execute. The usually very calm but also very caustic critic of the Vossische Zeitung was so scandalized through Busoni's reading of the C sharp minor sonata and of the 32 C minor variations that he did not hesitate to call Busoni "unmusical." I do not go so far, and, in fact, I disagree completely with my esteemed colleague, for I consider Busoni extravagantly musical, only he is so more with his brain than with his heart; and his pondering over the meaning of the works he interprets, and his researches into the mental secrets he wants to discover, often lead him into fallacies which might seem to some unmusical, while they are in reality nothing but exaggerations of musical detail work. Hence Busoni, with all his temperament, has little warmth, and his brain work, while it will help to unravel and put plainly before your ear the intricacies of the ugly fugue of the Beethoven "Hammerklavier" Sonata, will fail to satisfy your inner cravings for the display of the beauties in the three first movements of that identical work. But he will surely interest you in the interpretation of so purely spiritual a work as Liszt's B minor Sonata, with which he closed his first recital.
