Here is something altogether out of the ordinary: a powerful and unusual programme, shrewdly assembled, and a remarkable pianist as yet barely known to the wider concert-going and record-buying public.
If the story is to be believed, the multiple prize-winning Giovanni Bellucci (born in Rome in 1965) did not go near a piano until he was 14. At 20, he was deemed a phenomenon by his teachers; Lazar Berman was among those who later marvelled at his talent. The Italian school of piano playing, too little considered outside Italy as a subject in its own right, has always been distinctive in its physical and intellectual temper: the names Busoni, Zecchi, Michelangeli, Ciani, Pollini suggest what that implies. Listen to the controlled vitality of rhythm in Bellucci's playing and the spare, some would say ascetic, beauty of his sound, and you will instantly recognise an artist who was born into and brought up in that tradition.
How, in the normal course of things, one groans when yet another pianist chooses to introduce himself to a larger public with late Beethoven. This is not the case here. What is so remarkable about Bellucci's account of the Hammerklavier is the sense it communicates that it needed to be recorded now. The reading itself is 'ready', of that there is no doubt. The notes have been mastered, the terrain mapped, and the journey undertaken on a sufficient number of occasions for Bellucci not only to be a reliable guide, but also an interested and enquiring one. (How the metrical ambiguities of the Scherzo and the delusively 'calm' Trio here tug at sense.)
Over and above these qualities, however, is the abundant vitality of the whole performance and (since the slow movement is not the least of its glories) its untrammelled freshness of feeling. To 'know' the Hammerklavier, yet to be able to play it in a way that is unburdened by a consciousness of that knowledge, is a rare thing. It explains, in part, the continuing allure of the two comparative versions listed above.
The performance of the Hammerklavier itself is one substantial achievement; the other is the coupling, which is a stroke of genius. What we have here is the cross-referencing of the Hammerklavier, a seminal work of the new romanticism played here in the Italian way, with another seminal work of the new romanticism also realised in the Italian way. Busoni's exacting, terrifyingly difficult, yet musically symbiotic realisation for solo piano of Liszt's great organ epic Fantasia and Fugue on the chorale 'Ad nos, ad salutarem undam' is one of the great piano transcriptions. An old friend, who knows more of the organ and its ways than I do, took out a wonderful old Demessieux LP of Ad nos (Decca, 4/53 - nla). Hearing Busoni's transcription (a rare opportunity, since it is rarely attempted) and Bellucci's realisation of it surviving - nay, thriving - under the guns of the original, was an awesome experience.
Assai is a French company distributed in the UK by Discovery. Its booklet notes leave something to be desired (the English translation reads like a Gerard Hoffnung spoof) but the recording, made in the Arsenal at Metz, is marvellously clear, with all manner of subtleties in both sound and presentation. Acquire this record while you can, would be my advice; it could well become a collectors' item.'