Busoni: Elegies, An Die Jugend

Ferruccio Busoni’s Elegies (1908) and An die Jugend (1909) are experimental pieces that explore new pathways in the composer’s harmonic language and artistic evolution. Elegies is an aesthetic manifesto, a wish for a turning point in the composer’s creative evolution, but also, more ambitiously, in all future music. An die Jugend is a collection of four pieces written in 1909 which share some stylistic features with Busoni’s first Elegy, while showing even further experimentation on the composer’s part. Carlo Grante is one of Italy’s foremost concert pianists. He has performed in such major venues as the Vienna Musikverein, the Berlin Philharmonie’s Chamber Music Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall and Barbican Hall, Rome’s Santa Cecilia Hall, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Dresden Semperoper, the Stuttgart Opera, Prague’s Rudolfinum, as well as at Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center in the US. He has appeared as soloist with major orchestras including the Dresden Staatskapelle, London’s Royal Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony, Orchestra of St. Cecilia, MDR Leipzig, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and Concertino Wien. Grante performs these works on a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano.