Martijn Dendievel

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Josef Suk (1874-1935) was one of the most influential musicians of the Bohemian world: an outstanding violinist and composer, a pupil of Antonín Dvořák (whose daughter Otilie he married) and a member of the famous Bohemian Quartet, with which he played for forty years. His music, regularly performed at home, has recently been rediscovered by the present chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Kirill Petrenko, who has devoted three recordings to Suk. The orchestral suite Pohádka (A Fairy Tale) distils the incidental music written for Julius Zeyer’s Radúz and Mahulena, a stage adaptation of a traditional Slovak tale first performed in 1898, rich in broad melodic lines and original folk themes magnificently orchestrated.
Concerto in C major for piano, male chorus and orchestra, op. 39 K. 247

Born Italian and proud of his heritage, but also steeped in the intellectual tradition of German culture, Ferruccio Busoni’s music is a fascinating fusion of head and heart. Oscillating between neoclassical tendencies and a harmonic language reaching towards the avant-garde, it moves towards a way out of the by then exhausted language of Romanticism. With his gigantic Piano Concerto, the most colossal example ever written in the field, Busoni achieved the concerto equivalent of a Mahler symphony, vast and all-embracing. With its five movements and final chorus, Busoni’s opus 39 also holds the record for length in a concerto for solo instrument and orchestra, although «solo» and «tutti» merge in such a way as to remove entirely the conventional conflict of the Romantic concerto. The result is a choral symphony with obbligato piano. The world première took place in Berlin on 10 November 1904, conducted by Karl Muck, with Busoni at the piano. Again with Busoni as soloist, and with Bruno Mugellini conducting, the Concerto was then performed for the first time in Italy here in Bologna, in 1906. Seven years later Busoni would become director of the Bologna Conservatory, where he remained until 1915.