Busoni

A Busoni aficionado, Levit brings tautness without rigidity to tame the sprawling, potentially meandering, Bach-loving “Fantasia Contrappuntistica,” before closing with Busoni’s “Nuit de Noël,” another chromatic fantasia, gently snowy.

Maybe not, but the massiveness of Busoni’s expectation matters in ways both immediate and forgotten.

As composer, virtuoso pianist, theorist, highly opinionated futurist and pedagogue, Busoni exerted a little-acknowledged, though crucial, component of the cultural identity of San Francisco and beyond, Los Angeles very much included.

Busoni’s favorite pupil, the lesser-known and far stranger American pianist Richard Buhlig, settled in Los Angeles in the 1920s.

Petri fit right in as a proponent of Busoni’s prophetic vision, and as one of the world’s most celebrated pianists, he was particularly well poised to influence a generation of outstanding students.