SARA DAVIS BUECHNER
Sara Davis Buechner is a classical concert pianist of noteworthy accomplishment, virtuosic mastery, artistic sensitivity and extraordinary versatility. A major prizewinner of many of the world's most prestigious international piano competitions - Reine Elisabeth of Belgium, Leeds, Salzburg, Sydney and Vienna - she established her career by winning the Gold Medal of the 1984 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition in Salt Lake City, Utah, and as a Bronze Medalist of the 1986 Tchaikowsky International Piano Competition in Moscow.
Her musical art was molded by some of the most formidable keyboard virtuosos of the twentieth century - Filipino pianist Reynaldo Reyes; Americans Ann Schein, Phillip Evans and Beveridge Webster; Canadian pianist William Aide; Busoni pupils Edward Weiss, Gunnar Johansen and Mieczyslaw Munz; and graduate study with legendary keyboard masters Byron Janis and Rudolf Firkusny at the Juilliard School. Ms. Buechner has inherited, and proudly continues, their pianistic mantle.
She has appeared as soloist with North America's most prominent orchestras: the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia, Cleveland and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras; the Vancouver, Victoria and Calgary Symphony Orchestras; and abroad with the Japan Philharmonic, City of Birmingham (U.K.) Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Kuopio (Finland) Philharmonic, Slovak Philharmonic, and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León (Spain). Growing in popularity in Canada, Sara has also recently performed with the CBC Radio Orchestra, Orchestra London, the Montreal Chamber Orchestra, Hamilton Philharmonic and McGill Chamber Orchestra, and has played recitals from the Canadian Atlantic to the Pacific. She was recently the subject of a feature profile in MacLeans, Canada's national news magazine.
Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) was widely considered the pre-eminent Bach interpreter of his time even as his own approach to Bach's keyboard music aroused exceptional controversy. Busoni's edition of the Goldberg Variations, presented here in a rerelease of the 1997 world premiere recording, remains a controversial work as Busoni re-ordered the parts of the Variations, and he eliminates 10 variations altogether, and omits all repeats. This performance by Sara Davis Buechner is considered to be the reference recording as the best performance of the work available on recording and was profiled in the NY Times. The Keyboard Concerto BWV 1052 is one of Bach's famous and most beautiful works. From the first theme the listener is engaged, and the audience appreciates the intricate dialogue between the strings and piano. Bach himself re-used the materials in this work, originally thought to have been written for violin, in arrangement for an organ concerto, and again in two of his cantatas.
In the Bach-Busoni edition one finds a very liberated approach to the musical material at hand. At times Busoni is concerned with traditional pedagogical notes and editing; but there are also novel suggestions for performance incorporating re-writing, variant material, doubling of voices and use of all three modern piano pedals; and there are also original works by Busoni based upon themes or fragments of Bach. Included into the mix are substantial essays and performance notes related to Bach but ranging far afield, such as Busoni's comprehensive analysis of Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata fugue on three staves; an historical survey of Bach organ transcriptions by Franz Liszt, Carl Tausig et al. with guidelines to the creation of new transcriptions; experimental notes on the development of pianoforte technique; examinations of architectural form in Bach's music; and even a suggested new system of keyboard notation which eliminates the need for sharps and flats. Janus-like, Busoni takes us on an exhilarating simultaneous tour of music's past and future, with the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach as our sturdy ship.
