Music: Piano/Classical: Emil Gilels plays a fugue version of Bach by Ferruccio Busoni

Hat Tip to Luis Grassi Freire (Exonian).  See: YouTubeServices on refWrite's channel, yUT2ube.

Here in performance Gilels plays a version of a fugue by Johan Sebastian Bach, 

Prelude & Fugue in D major, BWV 532 - Fugue (2/2)

Emil Grigoryevich Gilels 

1919 - 1985

See: Biography of Emil Gilels (Wikipedia) and website In memoriam Emil Gilels.
and Donal Henahan, "MusicView: Who will replace 
the Old Guard in Soviet Music?" (NYT, Oct27,1985)

See also:  Emil Gilels - a Discography (2006) by Ates Tanin 

at the piano playing Ferruccio Busoni

Ferruccio (Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto) Busoni (1866 – 1924).

was an Italian composer,pianist, editor, writer, 
piano and composition teacher, and conductor. 

Aesthetics

Busoni's music can be considered in the context of his three major aesthetic beliefs: essence, oneness and junge Klassizität (literally 'young classicity'). The essence of music suggests that music is free from any prescriptive labels; in other words, it is absolute. For example, Busoni asked us to question just what it was in a piece of instrumental church music, that was inherently 'church'. The oneness of music proposes that music is free from prescriptive devices, and that there are endless possibilities of composition. Finally, in his words, junge Klassizität (often mistaken for neo-classicism) included 'the mastery, the sifting and the turning to account of all the gains of previous experiments and their inclusion in strong and beautiful forms' (Busoni, 'Letter to Paul Bekker', 1920).

His music falls in that most fractious of periods, the fin de siècle, where chromatic elements became part of the structure of the music, rather than being decoration. By studying Busoni's aesthetic beliefs we can suggest that his music is metatonal - given that he sought to include the old with the new to create limitless compositions. This is not to suggest (as Pfitzner did, when he attacked The Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music by Busoni) that his music is without form, nor is it without any sense of tonality (a common mistake when one finds oneself between Classical and Serial music). This grey area of music history is more engaging because the traditional forms and pitch structures have taken a side road, a road that did not ultimately lead to serialism.

In order to understand Busoni's compositions one should take only what is given in the music, and interpret them through his aesthetic beliefs (though this is no easy task, and the everpresent binarism between what a composer says and what a composer does should be kept in mind). Busoni can be recognised as a man with a variety of musical abilities. He wrote compositions and libretti, performed as a concert pianist, transcribed pieces by other composers (such as Bach, Mozart and Liszt), taught master classes, and produced aesthetic writings. It is to this end that Busoni considered music a fusion of disciplines, or to use his words 'to recognise the whole phenomenon of music as 'oneness'. (Busoni, 'The Essence of Oneness of Music', 1921).

For more information on this see: Paul Fleet, Ferruccio Busoni: A Phenomenological Approach to his Music and Aesthetics (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009).

Text and images from Busoni article in Wikipedia.

Bach-Busoni Editions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Bach-Busoni Editions are a series of publications by the Italian pianist-composer Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) containing primarily piano transcriptions of keyboard music by Johann Sebastian Bach. They also include performance suggestions, practice exercises, musical analysis, an essay on the art of transcribing Bach's organ music for piano, an analysis of the fugue from Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' sonata, and other related material. The later editions also include free adaptations and original compositions by Busoni which are based on the music of Bach.

Busoni issued his Bach editions over a nearly 30-year span in two collections: the 25-volume Busoni Ausgabe^[1] (Joh. Seb. Bach Klavierwerke) and the Bach-Busoni Collected Edition (Bach-Busoni Gesammelte Ausgabe), which was first issued in 6 volumes in 1916, and subsequently in 7 volumes in 1920. A small collection of selected excerpts with transcriptions of organ and violin music was also published separately in 1916 as Sechs Tonstücke (Six Tone Pieces).^[2][3][4]

^{Text and image from article Bach-Busoni Editions (Wikipedia).}