absolutely peculiar to the pianoforte, the Concerto is likely to be remembered. The two Mazurkas that were played in the second part of the concert were interesting examples of that form which apparently no composers but those of Slavonic descent can handle successfully. It may be hoped that anyone who listened to them attentively will have grasped the rudimentary point that there is nothing in common between that clumsy dance of Western Europe called the Polka Mazurka and the elaborate figure dance the music of which has been so wonderfully idealised in the Mazurkas of Chopin, Tchaïkovsky, Wiéniawski, Moszkowski, and Scharwenka. [Sidenote: =Busoni.= _December 23, 1898._] Of the four principal pianoforte styles--the Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt styles--Mr. Busoni has shown himself a past-master. It has been said that these four are the only genuine pianoforte styles. But if there is a fifth having typical originality distinct from all others, it is the Brahms style, and in that style Mr. Busoni was heard for the first time yesterday evening. His interpretation of Brahms's first Concerto was no less masterly than his Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt renderings. The work is one of exceptional importance. Written when the composer was only twenty-five years of age, and almost entirely unknown, and proving, when first produced at Leipsic, with the composer himself as soloist, a dead failure, it nevertheless was, like Carlyle's "French Revolution," the first work showing the author to be a genuine and original man of genius. It shows him deliberately rejecting all that was traditionally connected with the idea of a work in "concert style," affording to the soloist none of the conventional opportunities for display, demanding from him the mastery of an enormously difficult technique, full of double-note passages, full of heavy and exhausting reduplications; demanding also exceptional tact, intelligence, and presence of mind such as are only to be found in a few players of the very first rank. The music of the first movement is of profoundly sinister and tragic import, portraying the rage, grief, and unrest in some struggle of the heroic soul. It has nothing entertaining and nothing to propitiate superficial taste. No wonder it was a failure at Leipsic in 1859, when that centre of enlightenment was given up to the Mendelssohn cult! After the composer himself, the first pianist to take up the Concerto was Hans von Bülow, who with a performance at a Philharmonic Concert in Berlin won early recognition of its surpassing merit. Other performers who contributed towards the success of the work with the world in general were Madame Schumann and Mr. D'Albert. At the present time it may be doubted whether there is any better exponent of it than Mr. Busoni. What a German writer has called the "heaven-storming" first motive was delivered in a manner that showed perfect grasp of its poetic import, and the tragic eloquence of the