Thank goodness Busoni's Piano Concerto is returning to the Proms

On 5 August, Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto will be performed at the Proms for only the second time. It should have been the third time, but a Musician’s Union strike in 1980 forced the cancellation of the concert at which Martin Jones had been booked to give the première. Jones is a fearless virtuoso, still recording in his eighties, but one can’t help wondering whether his disappointment back then was tinged with relief.

In one place, the soloist’s fingers must wrap themselves around 128 notes in a single bar

Garrick Ohlsson, a long-time champion of the work, describes its difficulties as ‘absolutely immense, and 25 per cent of this piece is the most cruelly difficult writing in any piano concerto’. In one place, the soloist’s fingers must wrap themselves around 128 notes in a single bar. Also, it lasts more than 70 minutes. No wonder it hasn’t been heard at the Proms since 1988, when Peter Donohoe’s performance with Sir Mark Elder and the BBC Symphony Orchestra created such a sensation that EMI issued it as a CD.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Busoni’s death, and 31-year-old Benjamin Grosvenor is surely the perfect choice of soloist for the Proms. No other British pianist of his generation can match his combination of super-virtuosity and interpretative subtlety. But it will also be a test for Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, because the work morphs from a showpiece concerto to a mega-symphony in which the piano is sentenced to long stretches of obbligato. The last of its five movements intrudes a male chorus singing from Adam Oehlenschläger’s play Aladdin:

Lift up your hearts to the power eternal,
Feel Allah’s presence, behold all his works!
Thus the dead world comes completely to life.
Praising divinity, the poem falls quiet!

You may wonder if any other composer would have ended a piano concerto with a choral hymn to Allah.