Busoni: The Late Works

Music lovers are familiar with Ferruccio Busoni due to his extensive revisions of Johann Sebastian Bach's keyboard works, but the Italian's own compositions have long been reserved for the pleasure of a handful of connoisseurs. Looking at their technical scope, it is not difficult to see why: Busoni, a true-blue composer in the original sense of the word, possesses an original, eclectic style that is difficult to categorize. Pianist-performer Svetlana Belsky, who first discovered her love for the musical creator during her doctoral studies, thus insightfully avoids any attempt at stylistic classification, but rather interprets each and every piece with great respect to the particular work's inherent nature. Since Busoni's pieces, individually taken, run the whole gamut from a late-Romantic, occasionally even classical aesthetic to borderline atonality, one would expect a coherent interpretation to be a truly fearful challenge. But this is where the magic sets in: Marrying awe-inducing