This is one of the finest issues of piano music by Busoni that I have heard since Geoffrey Douglas Madge's six-CD set on Philips (4/88). Come to think of it, that was the last recording of Busoni piano music I heard. Still, with Douglas Madge's set now deleted, that makes this issue all the more welcome, particularly as the notes to this Olympia CD inform us that this is to be the first volume of a projected survey of the complete piano music.
William Stephenson is an ideal Busoni interpreter, and on the evidence of this disc I can think of few pianists better suited to undertake the task of recording the complete piano music. His strength, apart from his fluid phrasing and solid technique, is his ability to adapt between Busoni's early and late styles. So in the Suite Campestre and Macchietti medioevali (both written when Busoni was in his teens) we find Stephenson presenting these, sometimes Schumanesque pieces simply as the impressive and attractive youthful works that they are, rather than trying to turn them into deep and meaningful pointers of Busoni's music to come. When it comes to the later music it is my guess that Stephenson has thoroughly absorbed and investigated Busoni's late style (beyond the piano music that is) before committing anything to disc, for he clearly has a good understanding of Busoni's late musical aesthetic and the interrelationship of pieces.
Only in the crepuscular Berceuse elegiaque did I find myself questioning Stephenson's judgement where I found the tempo is perhaps a little on the fast side, but elsewhere, in the Elegy No. 1, Nach der Wendung and the Sonatina No. 4 for instance, he seems spot on. His performance of the Kammerfantasie on Bizet's Carmen (the Sonatina No. 6) is not perhaps in the same league as that of the late John Ogdon, but is none the less played with panache and verisimilitude. The Conway Hall recording and the Bosendorfer piano sound is very atmospheric.'