With his magnificent performance of the Beethoven E flat concerto Ferruccio Busoni carried off the honors of the fourth Nikisch Philharmonic concert on Monday evening. That was piano playing and Beethoven interpretation on a grand scale. How clearly, how lucidly did the great Italian pianist proclaim his ideas of this, the premier of piano concertos! Busoni's conception of Beethoven is noble, dignified, broad, full of warmth and passion, yet free from all sentimentality. It is by no means an objective Beethoven; Busoni does not follow the strait and narrow way of academic righteousness; on the contrary, he believes in the rights of the interpreter and his reading is colored with a highly interesting individuality. His superior musicianship and his instinctive feeling for the fitness of things musical keep him from all extravagances; yet that very unconventionality, that strong expression of a potent personality which speaks in Busoni's Beethoven interpretations is one of the most interesting features of his performance. What a wonderfully vital and appealing tone Busoni produces from the piano; how powerful and ringing are his chords and how pearly and transparent his passages! His scale work was a dream of perfection. Nikisch's accompaniment, too, was wonderfully sympathetic, so that the entire performance was a thing of joy and beauty. The audience was rather cool toward the other program numbers but lavished its applause on the great virtuoso. Rachmaninoff's new symphony in E minor, op. 27, a work in four movements, follows fairly closely the conventional symphonic style. Most of the themes have a decided Russian character, although the orchestral coloring of the work as a whole is not strictly national. The workmanship is masterly and the first three movements are grateful as well as interesting. The finale seemed to me weaker, both in point of thematic invention and workmanship. The reception it met with was not a very warm one. In a recent article I wrote about Rachmaninoff's symphonic poem, "The Isle of Death," which was produced by Fried; this was quite different in character from the symphony, the latter being more intelligible and more enjoyable, at least on first hearing. Nikisch's reading of the work was very sympathetic. He also gave a splendid performance of Liszt's "Tasso," which brought the program to a conclusion.
