While the numerous Bach-Busoni transcriptions are emerging from a period of purist abuse, they never quite dropped out of either the catalogue or the concert scene. Their grandeur had become indispensable to artists surviving from Busoni's era, and thus loomed as a sinful indulgence among the rising generation. Today, of course, the transcriptions are themselves artifacts of a former age's grasp of the past, to be looked at with that odd scholarly squint, and rehabilitated in the academic formaldehyde of "historical interest." But, apart from the Bach-Busoni things and an occasional hearing of the Sonatina super Carmen (or Chamber Fantasy on Bizet's Carmen), the range of Busoni's editing and arranging has gone largely unremarked, if not entirely unrecorded. A generation ago the great Paul Jacobs, playing Busoni with apostolic ambition in concert and on records, gave us magisterial performances of the sonatinas, the Seven Short Pieces for the Cultivation of Polyphonic Playing, the Bach-Busoni chorale preludes, and Busoni's youthful homage to Brahms in transcriptions of six of that master's 11 Chorale Preludes for Organ, op. 122 (available, at last, on CDs—Arbiter 124). Hearing the attenuated Jacobs readings of the Brahms side by side with Groschopp's forthright renderings is intensely moving as the music speaks in different but complementary ways. In the Carmen Fantasy and the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, where the competition is stirrer, Groschopp more than holds his own, though his go at them is unlikely to edge out your preferred versions. The Schoenberg transcription sparked a prickly correspondence between composer and arranger, or deranger (included in Antony Beaumont's Ferruccio Busoni: Selected Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987))—its inclusion marks one of the more interesting intersections of Modernism in the making. The seventeen-year-old Busoni's stark transcription of Siegfried's death scene contrasts sharply with his slapdash pianistic grandiloquence at twenty-one in an over-elaborate attempt to generate interest in Karl Goldmark's run-of-the-mill Merlin—great fun, nonetheless, with some ravishing moments. Their inclusion is entirely appropriate, for the interest of Busoni's career lies in the ways by which he created himself. The pianistic fripperies, the early collision with Wagner, and his lifelong jaundiced obsession with the master of Bayreuth are parts of it. This album is, simply, a necessary addition to the Busoni discography, carried off with panache. A studio recording, sound is uncramped, gutsily close, and incisively detailed. Sine qua non for the Busoni aficionado, and enthusiastically recommended to all who care for the literature of the piano.

-- Adrian Corleonis, FANFARE [7/2002, reviewing the original release of these recordings, Capriccio 10896]