Andrew Clements 

Busoni: Clarinet Concertino; Flute Divertimento; Rondo Arlecchinesco, etc – review

From strange but interesting to totally baffling, this is a very well played overview of Busoni's career, writes Andrew Clements
  
  


This very well played selection of rarely heard orchestral works moves chronologically through Busoni's career, though with its debts to Mendelssohn and Weber, the earliest of them, the deftly worked Lustspielovertüre, from 1897, is stylistically far removed from the later pieces here. Gesang vom Reigen der Geister and Rondo Arlecchinesco come into the strange but interesting category: both are part of the set of six orchestral Elegies that Busoni had begun with the much better known Berceuse Elégiaque of 1909: the dark shifting harmonies of Gesang vom Reigen sharply contrast with the neoclassical brittleness of the Rondo, which was a study for Busoni's comic opera Arlecchino, and which pitches a wordless tenor into the musical mix in its final minutes. The Clarinet Concertino seems like a throwback to one of Weber's clarinet works a century on, while the bizarre flute Divertimento seems to wrestle with musical material that seems totally unsuited to the flute. As so often with Busoni, the mix of styles is baffling.

 

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