Larry Sitsky has spent a lifetime performing, teaching, editing and studying Busoni's music. He has recently completed an ending to Busoni's great opera Dr. Faust, which will be heralded in the great opera houses of Europe; as well, he is currently working on another book on Busoni's instrumental, vocal and operatic music, and must be considered a world authority on this fascinating figure.
This volume is decidedly a labor of love. The author (an Australian musicologist) was evidently originally influenced by his first piano teacher, Winifred Burston, herself a pupil of Busoni. The work is not merely a catalog of all the piano compositions (solo, four hands, two pianos, piano and orchestra, arrangements, transcriptions, hybrid works, unpublished works) as the title might imply, but a vast descriptive, critical, and sometimes analytical essay. The splendid, many-faceted treatment was almost necessary if the author were to fulfill his aim, to ``throw some light on Busoni's thought processes as a composer and performer and to interest pianists in performing Busoni.'' He thus treats many areas of the composer's work, such as his theory of notation, his compositional growth, etc. Essential for academic music collections. J. Richard Belanger, Susquehanna Univ. Lib., Selinsgrove, Pa.
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