Ferruccio Busoni (Empoli 1866 - Berlin 1924) died the same year as Puccini and was born when Puccini was a child, yet he was way more than an opera composer. While he lived several years in Trieste and some time in Bologna, he mainly lived abroad and spent the second half of his life in Berlin. Way more than a composer, he was a wide-ranging artist and musician, an acclaimed concert pianist and sought-after piano teacher, a learned reviser of piano music, and the author of many and varied pieces. Busoni was also an aesthete, an intellectual, a music reformer, and author of texts on musical topics. A child prodigy, he wrote the Symphonische Suite for orchestra at the age of 17. Nicola Bignami and Lucija Majstorovic brilliantly face the arduous task of performing the two monumental and demanding sonatas for violin and piano that the composer wrote at twenty-four (first sonata) and at thirty-two (second sonata), in which the equal and dialogical relationship between the two instruments combines with a wealth of invention with respect for the great tradition.
Ferruccio Busoni (Empoli 1866 - Berlin 1924) died the same year as Puccini and was born when Puccini was a child, yet he was way more than an opera composer. While he lived several years in Trieste and some time in Bologna, he mainly lived abroad and spent the second half of his life in Berlin. Way more than a composer, he was a wide-ranging artist and musician, an acclaimed concert pianist and sought-after piano teacher, a learned reviser of piano music, and the author of many and varied pieces. Busoni was also an aesthete, an intellectual, a music reformer, and author of texts on musical topics. A child prodigy, he wrote the Symphonische Suite for orchestra at the age of 17. Nicola Bignami and Lucija Majstorovic brilliantly face the arduous task of performing the two monumental and demanding sonatas for violin and piano that the composer wrote at twenty-four (first sonata) and at thirty-two (second sonata), in which the equal and dialogical relationship between the two instruments combines with a wealth of invention with respect for the great tradition.
