Busoni, at his second recital on Wednesday, set in motion currents of enthusiasm that threatened to sweep Beethoven Hall off its foundations. He played with a force, breadth and authority, a penetration, intellectual lift and fire, rare even in him. It was interesting to hear him in the Beethoven Op. 53 and 111, because we had heard Ansorge play the same two sonatas a few days before. Busoni's interpretation of Beethoven is heroic and of grand proportions, while Ansorge's is more emotional and poetic. The Italian's playing of these two immortal works was inspiring in its profundity, quite especially that of the op. 111. The program was devoted to Beethoven and Liszt only, the latter composer being represented by the "Annees de Pelerinage" (second year, Italy) and the "Don Juan" fantasy. Probably no other living pianist has studied Liszt as has Busoni; although he was not a disciple of the Weimar master and never even played for him, he has in his library every scrap of music ever written by Liszt. His reading of the seven movements of the Liszt suite, which are seldom heard thus together, was highly interesting and masterly, while his "Don Juan" was simply phenomenal. Busoni is one of the most subjective of living pianists, and his conceptions would by no means always meet with the approval of the strict academicians, but his very subjectiveness makes him all the more interesting to all but the Philistines. Being almost entirely self-taught, he follows no chablone and his genius is at once manifest in his stupendous technic, not to mention all the other attributes of which he is in possession. None but a positive genius, especially when an autodidact, could acquire such a marvelous, forceful, individual technic. Busoni's technic is, above all, highly modern, and this cannot be said of all the great living technicians. He has a penchant for Liszt transcriptions of old Italian operatic melodies, and as one of hits encores he played one of the three "Lucia" fantasies.
