But if Gustav Mahler spread this aspiration across the orchestra, Busoni condenses it into the orbit of a single pianist. The result is a kind of super-concerto—clearly built for a virtuoso but stretched so far that it starts to feel philosophical. Busoni gathers the grand rhetoric of the German symphonic lineage, the restless playfulness of his Italian heritage, and the inward gravity of a thinker for whom Faust was a lifelong companion—a fixation so deep that he eventually composed his own ope