Having already established his Busoni credentials in a collection centred on the six Sonatinas (A/21), Victor Nicoara now releases this no less revealing anthology which focuses on the composer as he appeared to his contemporaries, successors and most likely to himself.

Nicoara ensures the Sieben kurze Stücke, the distillation of Busoni’s mature pianism, becomes a fluidly cohesive entity – its gnomic ‘Preludietto’ being followed by studies from the gently inscrutable to the playfully recalcitrant, the angular paraphrase ‘Nach Mozart’ positing a link to Bach that is essentialised in the final study with its pervasive use of the sustaining pedal. Benedict Mason then toys capriciously with Busonian practice, whereas Nicoara renders a key fragment from Busoni’s unfinished opera Doktor Faust with fluent fidelity before he directly apostrophises Weill with a darkly humorous homage. A longtime advocate and author of the monumental The Compleat Busoni (Australian National University Press: 2023), Larry Sitsky is heard through an ethereal study as distant now from our present as from Busoni’s own time.

Nicoara’s succinct booklet note confirms his intent to establish his own ‘definitive version’ of the epic Fantasia contrappuntistica out of the three editions Busoni himself published. Earlier pianists partly attempted this – not least John Ogdon, whose magisterial recording remains among the greatest – but the present account is evidently one with which to reckon. Probing and volatile in the opening Chorale-Variations, Nicoara traverses the initial three fugues with due appreciation of their cumulative intent as of their textural elaboration, the Intermezzo with its three variations providing an improvisatory breathing-space before a final sequence centred on the Fourth Fugue drives the work to its stark yet decisive close.

Ogdon’s recording of the Fantasia, as with that of the Stücke by Marc-André Hamelin, remains essential, but Nicoara is worth setting alongside them. Measured and serene, his take on the transcription of Bach’s Ninth Sinfonia closes this valuable addition to the Busoni discography.