BUSONI'S FAREWELL RECITAL IN BERLIN
Huge Audience Hears Pianist's
Final Performance Before
American Tour
BERLIN, Dec. 11. - A veritable magician sat at the piano in Beethoven Hall on Saturday. The name of Ferruccio Busoni and the likelihood of hearing this wonderful artist but once prior to his departure for his American tour sufficed to fill the hall unto suffocation. Police regulations were apparently annulled for once. People were content to stand packed in the aisles and to crowd the platform.
Criticism of Busoni seems nothing less than presumption. One can but emphasize again and again his greatness. Under his hands the piano seems to lose its usually accepted characteristics and really to become an entire orchestra. The multiform expressions of which Busoni are capable are baffling. Whether he plays Weber's "Perpetuum mobile" in a tempo to make one gasp, coloring his interpretation with a series of nuances that seem a revelation, or whether he arouses one's mirth with Liszt's "Vergessener Walzer," one can but marvel at the musical and artistic depth of his genius. His masterful technique is ever subjugated to a higher will and utilized only to express ideas that represent the acme of true art.
What matters if after all if Liszt's transcription of Schubert's "Erlkonig," in all its mighty grandeur, seemed less the "Erlkonig" of Schubert, as we know it, and more a construction of Busoni's himself! What other pianist could express the chant of the sirens so seductively as Busoni? Imagine, if you can, the music of a number of ethereal harps wafted from afar, and you have the effect Busoni creates in this work. The pianist's own compositions, "Waffentanz" and "Friedentanz" arose under his own hands as masterworks. O.P.J.
