Miraculous soloist makes Busoni’s Piano Concerto a five-star Prom

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★★★★★In 1907 Henry James described shelf-bending 19th-century novels as “large loose baggy monsters”. Had he heard Ferruccio Busoni’sPiano Concerto three years earlier, with the composer himself as soloist, he might have thrown it into the same menagerie.
Reflecting Busoni’s own voracious musical appetite and wanderlust, the work is one of the longest of its kind, at 70 minutes, with hardly one off for the pianist and with the final 15 verging, if not on the mad, then the hubristic. After a false ending, Busoni inserts some fairly demanding music for male chorus set to a German translation of a Danish play about Aladdin.
Whether aesthetic comedy or tragedy — there were a few titters from this audience — the concerto’s cosmopolitan vision is clear and may well be its saving grace: it’s truly kaleidoscopic. At this Prom marking the composer’s centenary, no musicians seemed more capable of handling its protean nature than Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the much-lauded pianist Benjamin Grosvenor who, from his opening statement on, emerged not only as the champion but companion this Frankenstein creature sorely needs.
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Gardner and the LPO first proved they were up to the task with the Symphonic Dances by Rachmaninov (who had a very different attitude to his audience: he’d cut pieces during performance if he sensed interest waning). These are more symphonic than dance-like and this performance didn’t deny it, leaning into its endless melodies. If there was something dance-like here, it was the close contact between orchestra and conductor who were in a fluid, symbiotic relationship throughout.
It laid the groundwork for the concerto which, with Grosvenor’s galvanising dynamo at its centre, did dance. Grosvenor’s octave leaps, cross-hand jumps, note-perfect and sensitively shaped runs all peaked and landed where they should, miraculously. I might have compared him to Fred Astaire if there wasn’t something so English — gentlemanly and unshowy — about his playing, whether the score called for flash or filigree. An Italian might have called it sprezzatura.
He showed particular tact, in several senses, in the ponderous third movement, where some musical ideas get a bit more airtime than they deserve. Long before that final chorus, here sung from the gallery by members of the young Rodolfus Choir sounding mostly older than their years, I was convinced the piece probably is worth a spin (every Olympic year?) with a pianist like this in the driver’s seat.Available on BBC Sounds
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