Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Max Reger, Ferruccio Busoni, András Schiff, Peter Serkin
Mozart / Reger / Busoni: Music for Two Pianos (2CD)
On Music for Two Pianos András Schiff and Peter Serkin, friends for many years but rarely heard as a duo, play a programme built around the fugue. Mozart opens and closes it, with Reger and Busoni in between, and each piece looks back in some way to Bach. This double CD marked the ECM New Series debut of both pianists.
The two had played together before, including Bach's concertos for two and three keyboards with the Camerata Bern. In 1997 they made a short North American tour with this material, and recorded it in November of that year at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. Serkin produced the sessions with Philip Traugott, Tom Lazarus was the engineer and Manfred Eicher executive producer. In the booklet Klaus Schweizer describes the sequence as "a kind of Kunst der Fuge" in its own right.
The first disc begins with Mozart's Fugue in C minor K. 426 and continues with Max Reger's Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Beethoven Op. 86. Reger's theme is the eleventh Bagatelle from Beethoven's Op. 119, and his variations range from close paraphrase to free pieces that hardly recall it, before a fugue of orchestral weight. The second disc holds Ferruccio Busoni's Fantasia contrappuntistica, an imaginative reconstruction of the unfinished final fugue of Bach's Art of Fugue. Busoni began it in 1910 on a liner bound for America and arrived at this two-piano version in 1921. Serkin had recorded it before with Richard Goode for CBS. The set ends in a lighter mood with Mozart's only sonata for two pianos, in D major, K. 448.
Reviewing a 1997 concert by the duo, Bernard Holland of The New York Times contrasted "Mr Serkin's rigorous asceticism" with "Mr Schiff's ever-thoughtful elegance". He heard the Reger and Busoni as grand dramatic structures and the sonata as pure charm. In BBC Music Magazine, Nicholas Rast rated the recording four stars, praising its "crystal clarity" and the "persuasive musical argument" of the programme.
This is the double CD on ECM New Series, ECM 1676/77, first released on 29 March 1999.
