Thal, have you heard Alan Bush's piano concerto? It is on a scale perhaps only matched by the Busoni, complete with a chorus in the finale. I have not listened to it enough times to really give a fair evaluation of it, but it isn't coming close to the Busoni yet. I wasn't expecting it to. I was expecting something good, though, for I did like his piano sonata and his second symphony.
Comparisons to the Busoni concerto are perhaps inevitable, given the scale of Bush's concerto and the chorus in the finale - but this perhaps is a classic example of the phrase "comparisons are odious", since one would have to go on a very long, arduous and likely fruitless journey to find a piano concerto that
does come close to the Busoni! That said, it is one of Bush's best works, I think, although it has yet to receive a really good performance and the Randall Swingler "poem" that the composer sets in the finale is of such shameful quality that it remains a wonder to me that Bush even read it, let alone set it - yet somehow the music succeeds in transcending its ghastly cheap sentiments (no small achievement in itself!). As you no doubt know, Bush wrote it to play himself and was the soloist in its première.
the rather tame piano concerto by Michael Tippett, which is a rather sunny and optimistic work. It is nothing like his more difficult (but still rewarding) later music such as his epic third and fourth symphonies. You should really like the piano concerto, though.
"Tame"? That's abit unfair! It's an immensely attractive work from one of the best and most sustained creative periods of his career, although it's quite blisteringly uncomfortable to play, displaying as it rather embarrassingly does that its composer probably had less idea of how to write for the piano than Godowsky did as to how to write for the contrabass clarinet; oddly, however, it doesn't actually
sound like slipshod piano writing, especially in the hands of John Ogdon (who was the first pianist that I heard playing it). I'm sorry to say that Tippett's Third Symphony is my least favourite by far of his non-stage works; the Fourth, whilst somewhat abstruse in places, does a lot to make up for it and the Second is possibly his finest orchestral work of all. A few years ago, BBCSO / Slatkin played a concert in which the Bush Piano Concerto (soloist Rolf Hind) followed Tippett's Second Symphony, which did the Bush no favours, especially as most of the rehearsal time had evidently gone into the far better known of those two works.
Best,
Alistair
Topic: 20th Century British Composers