Here’s a well-balanced recital showcasing Busoni’s keyboard creativity as transcriber and original composer. Pianist Jiayan Sun opens with Busoni’s edition of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. It’s basically Bach’s text with added octaves, filled-out textures and a fully notated interpretation of the chords upon which one is free to arpeggiate. Sun’s clear and transparent fingerwork doesn’t bring out the implicit grandeur and largeness of scale but he admirably sustains the Fugue’s basic tempo and prevents it from bogging down. His performance of Busoni’s Toccata is one of the finest on disc. Following the brisk and incisively buoyant Preludio comes a slightly reserved Fantasia that leads into a nimble Ciaconna that makes most other recordings sound thick. The Berceuse’s caressing accompaniment and long cantabiles sound as if originating from two different pianos. Sun’s interpretation of the Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach subscribes to my view that the only way to make this convoluted opus convincing is to play it more like Ravel than Brahms, and to keep everything lithe and light.

Unlike many Busoni ‘specialists’, Sun takes the first Indianisches Tagebuch piece’s agitato directive seriously. He articulates the Vivace’s rapid counterpoint with more variety than anyone else, and plays the final two movements straight while avoiding the temptation to pound out the big chordal climaxes. The Carmen Fantasy is a bit held back and studio-bound, and never really lets go with the freedom and ardency of the great 78rpm versions from Claudio Arrau, Michael von Zadora and Egon Petri. Sun’s breathtaking facility and poise impress throughout Busoni’s completion of Liszt’s unfinished Fantasy on two motives from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. To be sure, his sleek control differs from the swashbuckling bigness heard on Petri’s Westminster recording, the newly reissued live Boris Bloch performance on DG or, best of all, Alexander Shtarkman’s incendiary 1996 traversal once available from Russian Disc. In essence, Jiayan Sun is a cool rather than a hot Busoni player, yet an undisputed master of this music’s domain. Excellent annotations and sound.