Alfred Brendel plays Busoni & Liszt

The most unknown Brendel Alfred Brendel certainly needs no introduction; as one of the most important pianists of the second half of the 20th century, his numerous recordings, first with Vox, then with Vanguard and finally, in the most important years of his artistic maturity, with Philips, are almost constantly to be found in the catalogue and have been reissued time and again. Yet there is a small part of his musical legacy that has remained virtually unknown to admirers of Brendel's interpretative art: four LPs that he recorded at the beginning of his career in the early 1950s for the short-lived American label SPA. None of these recordings have yet been released in their entirety in the digital age, but there is one recording among them that is certainly one of the most important in Brendel's discography: the monumental Fantasia Contrappuntistica BV256 by Feruccio Busoni (1866-1924) on the themes of the quadruple fugue from Bach's The Art of Fugue BWV 1080. It is now reissued on APR with the explicit blessing of the performer, together with his first solo LP, the complete recording of Franz Liszt's Christmas Tree S186 (1873-76), a suite of 12 piano pieces that has been neglected by performers, as has the Busoni arrangement of Bach's Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ BWV 639. Busoni's Fantasia Contrappuntistica and Liszt's Christmas Tree were first recorded at the time and the pianist unfortunately never played them again in the recording studio, so we have here a truly important addition to his discography. Moreover, the booklet contains a contribution specially written for this edition by Brendel with some worthwhile thoughts on Busoni and his monumental composition.