United Kingdom PROM 23 – Rachmaninov, Busoni: Benjamin Grosvenor (piano), London Philharmonic Orchestra / Edward Gardner (conductor). Royal Albert Hall, London, 5.8.2024. (CK)
Rachmaninov – Symphonic Dances
Busoni – Piano Concerto
You wait years for a Bus(oni), then two come along at once. Benjamin Grosvenor played the Piano Concerto at this BBC Prom: Kirill Gerstein is to perform it at the Barbican in the autumn. No doubt there will be other performances at various places worldwide in this centenary year of Busoni’s death: a cause for celebration.
The evening’s conductor Edward Gardner wrote in the Proms Guide that ‘it’s a piece everyone should experience at least once in their lifetime’: and it was in that spirit that most of us in a well-filled hall had come along, some of us having dusted off John Ogdon’s magisterial performance in our CD collection and given it a listen (at least that’s what I did).
A piano concerto as long as Mahler’s Fifth (and with as many movements)? With a full symphony-strength orchestra? And a male chorus? Clearly Busoni was going for broke here – no fan of Wagner, he seems to have come up with his own version of a Gesamtkunstwerk. He is such a fascinating character: a keyboard Titan who synthesised Bach’s majesty and Liszt’s fireworks, an Italian who kept abreast of the upheavals in Austro-German music (he and Schoenberg enjoyed a mutual respect), a formidable intellectual who (Alex Ross tells us) advised his pupil Kurt Weill: ‘Do not be afraid of banality’. Weill called Busoni ‘the last Renaissance man’. Yet he has left us hardly any music that will fit comfortably into a concert programme: the Berceuse elegiaque crops up occasionally (I remember hearing the Busoni and Zemlinsky scholar Antony Beaumont conducting it in Cambridge while he was still an undergraduate).
Even the orchestral introduction is probably the longest on record: the main theme has an almost Elgarian sense of nobility and spaciousness. After the best part of five minutes the piano crashes in, thundering up and down the keyboard, on and on, as if this were a Gerard Hoffnung Concerto to end all Concertos. It is magnificent: and for the remaining ten minutes of the movement Benjamin Grosvenor was almost continually in action, in music of extraordinary range and bravura. The ensuing Pezzo giocoso is a whirling phantasmagoria, the orchestra insisting on a taut, galloping figure while the pianist does his own scintillating, mercurial thing.
I imagine that this is the first piano concerto to feature a tambourine. Busoni’s use of percussion in a concerto must have seemed revolutionary: in addition to the timpanist there were three percussionists, and in places they were kept busy. At a couple of climactic moments in the later movements Busoni even co-opts a percussion player as second timpanist.
The kernel of the concerto is the central Pezzo serioso, a 20-minute movement which Busoni divides into three sections with an introduction. Although I am no expert, I had a clear sense of Busoni’s long-range thinking: his long paragraphs always seem to know where they are going. The music is at first mysterious and expectant: the piano has a theme which begins rather like a muted, measured version of Widor’s Toccata. The second section brings a new urgency and a heroic, decisive phrase on the piano which comes to dominate proceedings.
As the changing moods of the music succeeded one another, two things became clear. The first is that Busoni does not require the piano to be in the spotlight all the time: there are sections where it acts as accompanist to part or all of the orchestra, as if it has become an element in a symphonic texture rather than a distinct personality. The second is that this piece inevitably poses problems of balance in some of the louder passages: there were times, especially in the whirligig Tarantella, where I could see rather than hear Grosvenor’s extraordinary piano playing. Worth remembering at this point that if this was one of the demanding Brahms piano concertos, it would be over by now: but Grosvenor seemed tirelessly brilliant. The orchestra too was superb: the popular song hilariously introduced by pizzicato double basses in this movement was one of my highlights.
And so to the choral finale, setting impressive lines hewn from the Danish dramatist Oehlenschlager’s Aladdin (which was to inspire Nielsen’s Aladdin music 15 years later). As ever, the hall played its part: put sixty-odd fine voices up in the Gallery, out of sight, and they are bound to sound transcendent – almost as if the angelic boys’ chorus in Parsifal has grown up and turned into a male voice choir. We were spellbound, and Benjamin Grosvenor, out of the spotlight, was at last able to relax his fingers, and his whole self, for the first time since his entry an hour before. He was there, of course, for the magnificently stirring coda, hammering away against brass flourishes, two timpanists, bass drum and a gong.
Hard to be objective about such an occasion; partly because of its singularity. Dr Johnson famously remarked in pre-PC days that ‘A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’ No special pleading needed here – it was superbly well done by pianist, conductor and orchestra: critical detachment came a distant second to wonder and gratitude for hearing the work in a performance such as this, regardless of whether you view it as ‘monstrously overwritten’ (Alfred Brendel) or ‘extraordinarily well written’ (Grosvenor himself). Would I like to hear it again? Yes: but if I don’t, I will count myself fortunate to have been present on this occasion.
After the mammoth concerto Grosvenor gave us an encore – an arrangement of Bach’s Prelude in D minor by Alexander Ziloti – which probably helped to calm us all down.
Before the interval, a work by another – and contemporary – virtuoso pianist and composer: Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, in a stupendous performance from Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, one that would crown any concert programme other than this one. I am sorry that here it only gets a footnote: it provided unchallengeable evidence – if any were needed – that this conductor and orchestra are one of the most exciting partnerships around. But this was Grosvenor’s night.
Chris Kettle