Spanning five movements that last over an hour, Busoni’s Piano Concerto is the apotheosis of the genre; a Sebaldian commentary on the piano, its mythos, as well as personal reflection on its composer’s sense of self. For once the informal adjective is apt — this music is epic. How else to describe a piano concerto that concludes with a chorus?
Just as epic was Los Angeles’ wait to finally hear the thing. More than a century passed until Grand Avenue resounded with Busoni’s monument to the piano, unleashed by guest super-virtuoso Igor Levit at last weekend’s Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts.
Preternaturally endowed to play Busoni’s Piano Concerto, Levit displayed his three-dimensional mastery in full. After the concerto’s Brahmsian opening, with songful solo horn soaring over the strings, Busoni hardly gives his soloist a moment’s rest. Colossal chords, massive tapestries of arpeggios and scalar runs, long passages of Chopinesque cantilena all were the vehicles which testified to its composer’s protean creativity, not to mention served as displays for the soloist’s Horowitzian wizardry. In some ways he goes beyond that. Levit’s pianism is brainy as well as dazzling — a uniquely 21-century kind of virtuosity.
In the ruminative third movement, he brought to the fore his opulent tone, convincing shading, and telling coloring of interior voices. Even in fearsome passages of rapid fingerwork, the pianist’s observance of each note’s full value ensured their individual sparkle and overall clarity. But there is also something more, an appealingly argumentative quality about Levit’s playing that surpasses mere interpretation. He is that rare pianist whose playing not only conveys the music, but also a running commentary on it.
Esa-Pekka Salonen [Image:Elizabeth Asher/Los Angeles Philharmonic]
Busoni and Levit found a matching virtuoso unit in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, the orchestra played with the exactitude and chrome-plated polish that is his trademark. Their individual components were no less breath-taking, such as the concerto’s hectic bassoon passages that, led by principal Donald Crockett, were executed with the sureness of an Olympic athletic team.
Salonen has evolved since the days of his youthful idiosyncratic interpretations of Romantic music. Sleekness and precision remain the foundations of his style, yet as long passages of the opening movement and finale proved, he has developed a willingness to yield, to mold phrases for rhetorical emphasis. He also proved an ideal partner to Levit: pianist, orchestra, and conductor worked as if they were all parts of a single body.
This was especially striking in the penultimate “All’Italia” movement, a bracing, motoric tarantella that in this performance was as much showpiece as it was a statement on Busoni’s pride in his mixed parentage — a foreshadowing of the world yet to come.
The Los Angeles Master Chorale during their performance of the “Cantico” [Image:Elizabeth Asher/Los Angeles Philharmonic]
Remarkably, the “Cantico” finale largely sees the soloist step aside from its own starring role. The men of the Los Angeles Master Chorale took the lead in Busoni’s Goethian invocation of eternity, which surely must have been ringing in Mahler’s ears as he penned his Eighth Symphony. Busoni here recounts the piano’s role as accompanist and here Levit, together with the Philharmonic, carried the voices aloft, soaring together until the concerto’s ecstatic final bars engulfed Disney Hall.