Richard Todd wrote:

>I know musicians, or pianists at any rate, who consider Busoni one of the
>greatest of composers.  John Ogden thought him the equal of J.S.  Bach.
>Of course Ogden admitted himself to the same circle of genius.  I've never
>heard Busoni's Doktor Faustus which is supposed to be a transcendnent
>masterpiece.  Does anyone know it?

Yes, and it's incredible...

On the other hand I'm prejudiced, since my mentor, Jascha Horenstein
was in the Busoni circle in Berlin in the 1920s and broke many batons on
Busoni's behalf throughout his career--including conducting the US premiere
of Doktor Faustus in concert form in NY in the mid 1960s.

You may want to try some of the "satellite" works related to Doktor Faustus
first- the Gielen Vox recording of the Sarabande and Cortege is fine, and
combined with a splendid reading of the suite from Turandot.

Or you might want to try either of the shorter operas first-Turandot or
Arlecchino. Both the Nagano recordings (still available?) and those on
Capriccio are excellent, the latter usually rather cheap.

The Nagano Doktor Faustus (still unreleased in the US) will be worth
having--the old DGG set despite Fischer-D's amazing performance, has many
problems, among them that it's cut--I think these are the "traditional"
cuts [if one can say that about a piece with such a spotty performance
history] as they are more or less what I remembered from a 1972 Zurich
performance, conducted like the DGG set by Leitner.  Nagano's is "more than
complete" in that the final pages, left by the composer in sketch form at
his death are given both in the "traditional" version elaborated by Jarnach
and in a new reconstruction by Anthony Beaumont.

Busoni was writing "intertextual" music [actually so was Brahms] even
before Stravinsky and Schoenberg "discovered" the past...I find it
enormously stimulating as well as moving..others may not..

Joel Lazar
Bethesda MD