I would rather say that Busoni is intellectualism and Paderewski intuition.
Paderewski's La Leggeriezza is one of the best recordings of Liszt playing on record.
That Leggeriezza is actually the mis-labelled work of Benno Moiseiwitch! Paderewski recorded the same piece, though it is
not on his Philipps Great Pianists compilation, and it sounds just as heavy as most everything else he recorded.
For me the greatest Liszt comes from Lhevinne, who recorded an unbelievable Feux follets, at incredible tempo, with the most jaw-dropping pedal effects you will ever hear. Those secrets are lost to pianists of today, who try and out-do each other for how brilliant they can make the music sound; they don't really explore the possibilities of sonority. These days, everyone just goes by conventional wisdom.
Conventional wisdom = the cliche of intuition.
I think when a lot of people talk about intuition, what they are really talking about is charisma. When we hear performers that grip us with the spontanaety of their playing, of course we have the impression they are making it up on the spot. Sometimes they are, sometimes not, but that can also be a cultivated effect.
Also, intuition is informed by experience. If you have certain parameters for how you approach the piano, you can access those in suprising ways for the audience, and it comes across as pure inspiration, which it undoubtedly is, though with a foundation of artistic learning.
Horowitz, for instance, was in many ways limited by this kind of playing. I love Horowitz and don't criticize him generally. But he could really only play music in a certain way; he had a large palette of effects which he could use in lots of different surprising combinations, and it was his intuition that told him when to use which where, but it wasn't just invented, in the sense that, "Oh, he has never played with that kind of sound before."
I think we should not be insecure about gaining knowledge, and not be insecure about knowledge we don't have. Many who push the idea of the intuitive over the intellectual are insecure about gaining knowledge - they are afraid it will make them change the way they do things. Many who are affected by this pressure are insecure about knowledge they don't have, and think they lack in intuition.
We should never, ever, be afraid to learn more, and to apply it to what we do. We should also profoundly distrust anyone who advises us not to learn about what we do.
As models, we should take the great composers of history, those whose work is organic, surprising, innovative, intuitive, but grounded most strongly in a deep and passionate search for knowledge in music. All the great composers have in common that they improved vastly over the course of their careers; they always were searching for ways in which they could express more strongly, more powerfully with their music. We should emulate them and do the same thing.
Walter Ramsey