Ready for something completely different at the Proms this year? Something unusually epic, visionary, pianistically fiendish, chorally serene and very rarely performed?
Then grab a ticket, plan your Proms place or have your radio at the ready as the London Philharmonic Choir’s lower voices, with singers from the Rodolfus Choir, join Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra to perform Ferruccio Busoni’s gargantuan and spectacular Piano Concerto at 7.30pm on the 5th August. This rarely performed piece commemorates the 100th anniversary of Busoni’s death and features brilliant British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor playing the staggeringly demanding piano part.
Completed in 1904, Busoni’s Piano Concerto is more symphonic than soloistic, and has now garnered a near-mystical reputation as it showcases a lengthy and fiendishly challenging piano solo throughout its five movements which end with an ethereal “male chorus” part. In this Prom it will be sung from the heavenly realms of the Royal Albert Hall’s dome.
Born in 1866, Busoni was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor, editor, writer and teacher who had an international career and reputation which led him to work closely with many of the leading musicians, artists and literary figures of his time. According to conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen “he was a trailblazer, and he predicted lots of things that are now commonplace in contemporary music, like microtonality. He even at some point was fantasizing about computers, before the concept even existed”. He was also a child prodigy and toured as a virtuoso pianist – something you certainly need to be to perform this thrillingly complex piece.
Fortunately, for this almost once in a lifetime performance, we have virtuoso pianist Benjamin Grosvenor at the keyboard. Also a child prodigy, at the tender age of 11 he won the keyboard section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004. At the age of 20 he graduated from the Royal Academy of Music and received the Queen’s Award for Excellence for the best all-round student of the year. He is now viewed as the pianist of his generation with superb virtuosity and great interpretive subtlety. He’s certainly going to need all of that for this remarkable and demanding piece which is renowned as one of the most challenging piano parts ever written – at one point it requires the pianist to play 128 notes in a single bar!
The chorus in the Piano Concerto features in the final movement (movement 5: Cantico. Largamente (with chorus)) when the piece has transformed from a showpiece concerto through mega-symphony to a more ethereal and distant choral hymn to Allah. The words are from an early 19th century version of Aladdin by the Danish playwright Adam Oehlenschläger, which Busoni translated with daily input from Goethe (who at the time was completing the final version of Faust, Part One). The Choir and Rodolfus’ lower voices will be ready and waiting in the wings (or should we say the Royal Albert Hall’s gallery), en masse and ready in full voice to perform the “Cantico. Largamente” which was originally written to be performed off stage.
Garnering many of the voices for this Prom has been the job of LPC tenor Mikolaj Walczak who arrived in the UK in 2020 after studying computer sciences at university in Poland. Whilst there, all students were required to take a humanities course and, despite never having sung classical music before, Mikolaj elected for the choir option and was instantly bitten by the choral bug.
Mikolaj joined the LPC in 2021 and soon became involved in the organisation of the Choir, quickly stepping up to be the tenor representative. This will be his third Prom and he’s really excited about this one because, he says, “It’s so huge and so different. I never dreamed of singing such wonderful things and although there’s slightly less than 10 minutes of singing in this piece, it’s really important. It’s a beautiful and lyrical part to sing and it’s quite a challenge too as we have to divide into in 6 parts – so some of us are singing parts we may not usually sing. I really can’t wait to perform this unusual piece and even if you can’t see us up in the heavens, I really hope you’ll enjoy hearing us!”
Let’s also hope also that the Royal Albert Hall will still be intact after this phenomenal Piano Concerto as, according to pianist Igor Levit, “It’s highly celebratory. I mean, the roof flies off the building, right? In the “All’Italiana” it’s very satirical. It’s incredibly beautiful, it’s funny, it’s solemn. It has it all.”
What more can we say – come along and find out for yourselves!
Come and hear us
Monday 5th August 2024
7.30pm, Royal Albert Hall
Edward Gardner conductor
Benjamin Grosvenor piano
London Philharmonic Orchestra
London Philharmonic Choir
The Rodolfus Choir
Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances
Busoni Piano Concerto
