BUSONI AS SOLOIST WITH PHILHARMONIC
Pianist Plays Liszt's E flat Concerto
New Works by Orchestra Members
As soloist at last Sunday afternoon's New York Philharmonic concert Ferruccio Busoni enjoyed an opportunity vastly more favorable than on his recent Metropolitan Opera House appearance to disclose anew his art to New York music-lovers after an absence of four years. He played Liszt's E Flat Concerto and was vigorously applauded by an audience which would, no doubt, have been larger had the weather been more propitious to concert going.
The Italian pianist has won much commendation for his Liszt performances, both in this country and in Germany, where he is held in most abiding esteem. Berlin to-day, in fact, venerates him as above reproach and pays willing tribute to the breadth and fullness of his intellect. However, there is no need at present to speculate abstractly on the phases of his artistic personality or to examine too closely the characteristic elements of German psychology which contribute thus to the exaltation of Mr. Busoni.
This particular concerto he has, of course, played here before, so that last Sunday's presentation effected no disclosures precisely new. It is not a great work, and inferior in many ways to the A Major Concerto. It affords considerable chance for brilliancy of effect, but relatively little for emotional publication. Mr. Busoni duly achieved effects of palpable brilliancy in a broad manner, with great assurance of technical command and extreme clarity of utterance. Yet the stamp of icy calculation and intellectual self-consciousness was graven on the delivery of every phrase. Even in his most dazzingly pyrotechnical moments Mr. Busoni evinces something manifestly cerebral; all is prefigured with relentless mathematical stringency and the results are not softened and suffused by a radiance of spiritual vision and the glow of poetic fervor, nor yet livened by the dash of a genuinely fiery temperament. His attitude has something uncompromisingly inflexible about it.
