I remember Gordon Green and his wife both telling me of the extraordinary technical and intellectual capacity of Peter Donohoe to play some of the most strenuous works in the piano repertoire. I am talking about fifty years ago, before Peter went on to his success at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1982, which launched his international standing and was the start of a career that has spanned over forty years. His curiosity to delve deeply into the piano repertoire and find works that are not always readily accessible to lesser mortals has never left him, and it reminds me of John Ogdon who like Peter could fearlessly discover a world where others dare not tread.
Gordon Green had studied for a period with Egon Petri, a pupil of Busoni and it was here that his passion for the works of Busoni was born and which he transmitted to his many illustrious pupils.
Peter Donohoe had opened this marathon recital with a work that he openly declared was the Beethoven sonata nearest to his heart. Op 101 could be described as a Sonata ‘quasi fantasia’ with it’s beautiful opening that returns towards the end giving a pastoral shape to a Sonata that is really the calm before the storm of op 106, which was to follow after the interval. A beautiful opening of luminosity, and like everything Peter played, an architectural shape of masterly musical understanding. An outpouring of poignant meaning played with simplicity and knowing musicianship with a beautiful sense of legato and extraordinary mastery of balance. A tightly drawn ‘Vivace’ had a continual rhythmic pulsation but with a line of absolute clarity and a contrasting ‘Trio’ of pastoral fluidity before the return of the ‘Vivace’. He brought great weight to the ‘Adagio’ which was played with simplicity and disarming beauty. The ‘Allegro’ entered gently as the knotty twine became ever more entangled but always with absolute clarity, and it was here that his masterly use of the pedal became ever more evident. There was a beguiling duet between voices with their inquisitive question and answer and trills brilliantly incorporated into the musical line like tightly wound springs as the movement became ever more entwined and grandiose. There was a beautiful pastoral coda before being interrupted by Beethoven’s final triumphant outburst.
A performance that was classical in its overall approach but romantic in its actual musical language. Playing without the score because this was a work deeply ingrained in his heart and obviously an important part of his concert repertoire.
The Fantasia Contrappuntistica,on the other hand, is a rarity in the concert hall and Peter admitted that it had not convinced him until he performed it in the two piano version with Emanuil Ivanov ( present in the hall ). https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2025/11/25/emanuil-ivanov-humility-simplicity-and-mastery-takes-st-marys-by-storm/
I think it is the first time I have heard the work in concert and it was indeed a formidable challenge that only a musician with a great intellect and endless curiosity could have undertaken. A fantasmagorical opening of grandeur and mystery. A continual outpouring of knotty twine of extreme intellectual importance and a ‘tour de force’ of resilience and above all musical intelligence. A truly grandiose ending, as Busoni is not one to leave the stage quietly! Busoni,of course, was well known for his long difficult programmes. In a period when pianists were titivating the senses, Busoni was delving deeply into the very meaning and future of music as his teacher Franz Liszt was to do in the last half of his life.
Mozart’s C minor Fantasy was where Peter combined simplicity, luminosity and drama with a beautiful sense of song where every note and every rest were played with disarming simplicity and great meaning. Sandwiched in-between the extreme intellectual complexity of Busoni and the dynamic drive of Beethoven it came as an oasis of simplicity where so few notes could mean so much.
One of the drawbacks of not being able to actually be in St Mary’s is that the wine so generously offered in the interval at the evening concerts, cannot be shared like the sounds on their superb streaming.
After the interval followed the longest and most difficult of all 32 Sonatas of Beethoven. Many pianists who are happy to perform cycles of the sonatas tremble at the thought of including the ‘Hammerklavier’. In four long movements with a slow movement that lasts over twenty minutes and a fugue that is so un-pianistic that it can only be undertaken by the most fearless of pianists who possess a virtuoso technical command of the keyboard.
It opens with a mighty fanfare and a treacherous leap, as this is a work where from the outset Beethoven shows us it is only for the fearless. Peter plays the first leap with one hand and the second with two which works very well as it shows fearlessness but not recklessness! A monumental performance of the ‘Allegro’, with of course the repeat of the exposition, and always with a driving undercurrent of energy that drove the music forward with clarity and luminosity.The opening of the development was bathed in pedal which contrasted so well with the clarity of the fugato that follows. Adding occasional deep bass notes, that Beethoven obviously intended, but did not have on the instruments of the day, it gave an aristocratic nobility to this most orchestral of opening movements. The ‘Scherzo’ was played with solidity rather than as a dance which contrasted well with the fluidity of the ‘Trio’.The ‘Adagio’ which is the very heart of this work was given a beautifully flowing tempo which did not exclude some exquisite moments, but always moving forward on a great wave of passionate intensity. All through this ‘Adagio’ there was a beauty of sound and a perfect sense of balance that allowed the melodic line to sing so naturally with a glowing luminosity of great poignancy. There was a rhythmic energy that gave strength to the architectural line where even the intricate embellishments were sustained by the inexorable inevitability of the bass. Peter made a very definite break between the ravishing end of this movement and before the improvised introduction to the mighty fugue that took flight with fearless virtuosity and dynamic drive. The difficulties just disappeared under Peter’s masterly hands as he drove the music forward to the final climax where he added even more notes to Beethoven’s mighty final chords. A monumental performance played with a musicianship where notes became just a means of expressing the impossible on an instrument that Beethoven had taken to its limit and beyond !
After such a marathon Peter wanted to play just one more fugue . It was the last fugue that Bach was to write and that he left unfinished at the end of his ‘Art of Fugue’ which had been the inspiration for Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica.
After nearly three hours of red hot music making the only way to calm the air was with the very first simple Prelude and Fugue in C major by Bach.
Memorable performances from a great pianist and unique thinking musician. Thanks to Dr Mather and his team it has been recorded and will act as a reference for the hundreds of pianists that will fill this redundant church with glorious music in the future.
Peter Donohoe was born in Manchester in 1953. He studied at Chetham’s School of Music for seven years, graduated in music at Leeds University, and went on to study at the Royal Northern College of Music with Derek Wyndham and then in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod. He is acclaimed as one of the foremost pianists of our time, for his musicianship, stylistic versatility and commanding technique.
In recent seasons Donohoe has appeared with Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic and Concert Orchestra, Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, St Petersburg Philharmonia, RTE National Symphony Orchestra, Belarusian State Symphony Orchestra, and City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He has undertaken a UK tour with the Russian State Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as giving concerts in many South American and European countries, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Russia, and USA. Other past and future engagements include performances of all three MacMillian piano concertos with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; a ‘marathon’ recital of Scriabin’s complete piano sonatas at Milton Court; an all-Mozart series at Perth Concert Hall; concertos with the Moscow State Philharmonic Orchestra, St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra at Royal Festival Hall; and a residency at the Buxton International Festival.
Donohoe’s most recent discs include six volumes of Mozart Piano Sonatas with SOMM Records. Other recent recordings include Haydn Keyboard Works Volume 1 (Signum), Grieg Lyric Pieces Volume 1 (Chandos), Dora Pejacevic Piano Concerto (Chandos), Brahms and Schumann viola sonatas with Philip Dukes (Chandos), and Busoni: Elegies and Toccata (Chandos), which was nominatedfor BBC Music Magazine Award. Donohoe has performed with all the major London orchestras, as well as orchestras from across the world: the Royal Concertgebouw, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Munich Philharmonic, Swedish Radio, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Vienna Symphony and Czech Philharmonic Orchestras. He has also played with the Berliner Philharmoniker in Sir Simon Rattle’s opening concerts as Music Director. He made his twenty-second appearance at the BBC Proms in 2012 and has appeared at many other festivals including six consecutive visits to the Edinburgh Festival, La Roque d’Anthéron in France, and at the Ruhr and Schleswig Holstein Festivals in Germany.
The 23/24 season kicked off with Peter Donohoe performing as a soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle with four performances of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie in London, Edinburgh, and Bucharest. In January 2024, Peter returned to Philadelphia for performance with the Ama Deus Ensemble and travelled to Dubai to adjudicate the 3rd Classic Piano Competition 2024.
Busoni was not only one of the greatest pianists of his age but also a composer and theorist of daunting intellect. His three idols were Bach, Mozart and Liszt.The Fantasia contrappuntistica has at its heart a realization of the incomplete final fugue from Bach’s Art of Fugue but seen in terms of twentieth-century harmony. The fugal sections are preceded by a chorale arrangement and interspersed with an intermezzo and variations; Busoni then creates an entirely new fugue on four subjects which Bach is thought to have planned, though he did not live to carry it out. In this work Busoni hoped to create ‘one of the most significant works of modern piano literature’. If its daunting complexity both for pianist and listener never make it a standard of the repertoire, it is certainly one of the most imposing of piano works
Brendel writes “the piece is a monumental fusion of thesis and antithesis, counterpoint and fantasy, Bach and Busoni, unexpected refinement of the piano sound and baroque independence from the means of sound—you will perhaps find a new sphere of instrumental art spread out before you.” In 1909, Busoni was working on a critical edition of Bach’s The Art of Fugue and he became fascinated with the last fugue, which Bach broke off at the entry of the fourth subject and abandoned the work at that point. Peter Donohoe suggested it might have been that he had brought the work to it’s ultimate state and he left it open for future composers to complete ,having pointed the way. Busoni consulted with the composer and theorist Bernhard Ziehn, who had published various theories for a modern approach to polyphony, in which “the symmetrical treatment of melodic lines gave rise to a wealth of new harmonies.”
Berhnard Ziehn was a German-born theorist based in Chicago, and he advocated the use of transpositions and inversions to combine Bach’s original line in an absolutely symmetrical way. The original intervals are preserved at all time, “with no regard for the very un-Bach-like harmonies that resulted. This way of working, of choosing apt combinations of lines from an almost unlimited realm of possibilities, rather than searching for combinations consistent with pre-existing rules of harmony,” immediately appealed to Busoni. He certainly had a complete and exhaustive command of traditional technique, but also realized the “inadequacy of such a technique for a contemporary composer.” As a biographer writes, “Busoni was perfectly conscious of his powers: he paid homage to the past by embracing it in the gigantic sweep of his intellect and he saluted the future through his consciousness of his own moral and intellectual superiority, a consciousness that was compatible with true dignity and humility.” In his Fantasia contrappuntistica, Busoni achieves a perfect synthesis of models from the past presented in a completely modern form.
In March 1910, Busoni completed his “Grosse Fuge,” which he described as “the most corseted of his compositions.” He writes to his wife, “Every note is spot on! Today is the first of March. I had planned to finish this monster fugue in February and I succeeded, but I won’t do it again!” Bach’s original fugue is built on three themes, but at the start of the third theme the manuscript is interrupted, and within its development, a fourth theme is introduced. Busoni identifies this fourth theme as the basic motif of the whole cycle. However, Busoni is not yet satisfied, and he created a fifth theme, which acts as a conclusion. Busoni assures his wife that he had been “working in the spirit of Bach,” but in the end he does not limit himself to these five fugues, “but further develops the piece through the addition of several other movements, so as to achieve, as he affirms, “the form of a grand fantasia.”Busoni prefaces his “Grosse Fuge” with his own variations on the Bach chorale “Allein Gott in der Höh sei er,” composed three years earlier. Breitkopf & Härtel explain the overall form of the work at the beginning of the published score: An “Introduzione” based on Bach’s chorale (Maestoso deciso, Allegro, Andantino) leads to the first three fugues on themes by Bach; an “Intermezzo,” which then leads to the “Variazioni” on the same fugues; then a cadenza leading into the fourth fugue. Before the final “Stretta” the Chorale reappears, with ‘dolcissimo’ chords in the high register of the keyboard.”
Published as the so-called “Edizione definitva” of the Fantasia contrappuntistica, the work nevertheless underwent a substantial number of revisions and versions. This includes an “Edizione minore” in 1912, basically a study edition with expanded but simplified fugal writing and different variations on the same chorale. Busoni had also planned to produce an orchestral version, but that project never materialized. Instead, on 6 August 1921, audiences were treated to a two-piano version, which integrates both sets of chorale variations and “clarifies but also abbreviates Bach’s underlying fugal arguments.” Regardless of version, Busoni created a work rooted in Bach and expanded with Lisztian textures, “that places him in a historical continuum, with a clear focus on the future.” According to critics, “it remains one of the most impressive works in the entire piano literature, a monumental undertaking that stretches the possibilities of composer, instrument, and performer to the limit.”
Busoni’s seven-volume Bach Edition includes not only performing editions and analyses of most of Bach’s keyboard works but also several contrapuntal studies, most of his own transcriptions and two versions of the immense Fantasia contrappuntistica. This life-long study and absorption was what led him in the first instance to the belief that a revival of the art of counterpoint might prove a guiding light to the future.
Bach’s The Art of Fugue, an uncompleted sequence of studies in fugal writing called Contrapuncti (‘his last and greatest work’, according to Busoni), is a compendium of contrapuntal skills at that summit of perfection to which the great master had taken them at the end of his life. Its final fugue, Contrapunctus XIV, was in Busoni’s words ‘planned on four fugue subjects, of which two are complete and the third commenced’. In the manuscript, a note thought to be in the hand of his son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, states that ‘At this point where the theme B–A–C–H becomes the countersubject, the composer died’, although some scholars believe that the work was abandoned at an earlier date. (In this recording this melancholy moment arrives at 2’05 in Fugue III.) In any event, a quadruple fugue is a fearsome event. In the first place the four themes must at some point combine, and the additional possibilities of interlocking countersubjects and their inversions become, as Busoni suggested, ‘as numerous as chess moves’. Conjecture as to the identity of the missing fourth subject was pursued by musicologists with the same fervour as mathematicians unravelling an unproven theorem. From his encounters with two German-born scholars then living in Chicago, Busoni was satisfied that the theme must be the opening subject of Contrapunctus I, which met all the requirements of compatibility and thus would ‘close the circle of the whole work’. He then set about completing Fugue III and composing Fugue IV, initially with a fairly vague idea of creating ‘something between a composition by C[ésar] Franck and the Hammerklavier Sonata’.
No sooner had his first version been published under the title Grosse Fuge, Busoni withdrew it and started work on the version heard in this recording, which he named Fantasia contrappuntistica, edizione definitiva. Later two further versions appeared: a simplified and abbreviated Versio minore and a version for two pianos.
Where Bach had been constrained by the laws of harmony as they then existed (though stretching them to the limit), Busoni decided that he should honour Bach’s genius while pursuing each line according to its own integrity and logic thus creating new and viable harmonies for his own time. ‘But new harmony could only arise naturally from the foundation of an extremely cultivated polyphony and establish a right for its appearance; this requires strict tuition and a considerable mastery of melody.’ And it is sometimes startling to discover that the most jarring moments have their origin not far away in Bach. A case in point is the tumultuous pile-up in the final Stretta which emanates from Contrapunctus VIII.Busoni devoted as much thought to the overall form as to the contrapuntal detail. He went so far as to add drawings to represent the architecture of his conception—a ship with five taut sails (‘moving over difficult waters’) superimposed on a cross (‘the form of a cathedral’) and a building whose doors represent the different ‘chapters’ of his narrative.
His most radical change from the Grosse Fuge (and an inspired one) was to begin the work with an evocative Prelude based on the ancient chorale ‘Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr’, not such a huge task since much of it existed already as one of his Elegies. In Fugues I, II and III, Busoni follows the plan of Contrapunctus XIV more or less exactly but adds his own voice in several ways, notably in the vastly extended compass and the chromatic modification of some voices to accord with his logical ‘modern’ vision of harmony, together with the insertion of references to a fifth theme of his own device which is first heard at the beginning of the piece. Another feature is the anchoring of Fugue I on a deep pedal D, causing it to emerge as if from a great depth, something we can observe in the distortions of old music ‘through a glass darkly’ of composers like Berio and Schnittke at the other end of the twentieth century. There follow an eerie Intermezzo (misticamente, visionario), three Variations of increasing complexity and a Cadenza before Fugue IV, which (of necessity) is entirely Busoni’s own composition. An ethereal reminiscence of the opening chorale presages the hectic Stretta before three imposing statements of the subject of Fugue I (two partial, one decisive) bring the huge edifice to a fittingly grand conclusion.
Sir Stephen Hough writes “I was really pleased to be sent this photo of my most important teacher, Gordon Green. He taught at both RNCM- Royal Northern College of Music and Royal Academy of Music. To one foreign student he said, as she graduated: “Now I want you to go home and forget everything I said”. We will always remember. “A teacher’s role is to become dispensable.” His indispensable advice inspires me to this day. “How you play now doesn’t interest me. Rather how you will play in ten years time,” wise words for a 15 year-old”
ChristopherAxworthy-MusicCommentary 