The Divertimento for Flute and Orchestra in B flat  MAJOR, Op. 52, BV 285 is among the works that the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni composed towards the end of his life. While working on his unfinished magnum opus Doktor Faust, he wrote two instrumental works that are among his most performed opuses: the Concertino for Clarinet, Op. 48 (1918) and the Divertimento for Flute and Orchestra, Op. 52 (1920). He conceived them as a kind of musical diptych. The composer himself described the Divertimento as perhaps the more fantastic, more masculine and shorter of the two pieces. It was composed in May 1920. The composer said that the music came to him as easily as writing a letter, with a completion date in the manuscript of May 24^th . Romantic in character and full of Mozartian bravura in the solo part, Busoni built his nine-minute Divertimento outlining three contrasting virtuosic movements: the first and third are full of vital energy that flows gracefully into a sensuous elegiac cantilena in the second movement.

The work is dedicated to the great French flautist, composer and conductor Philippe Gaubert (1879-1941) and was first heard on August 21^st, 1920 in a trial performance by the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra conducted by the Swiss composer and conductor Volkmar Andreae as Busoni’s farewell gesture to the orchestra before leaving again for Berlin. The official public premiere was on 13 January 1921 in an original concert with the Berlin Philharmonic under his baton, the soloist being the Dutch flutist Henrik de Vries. The score was published in 1922 by Breitkopf & Härtel. A year later the same publishers printed the arrangement for flute and piano by composer Kurt Weill (a student of Busoni), which was reissued in 1950, and in the 1960s with a performance by the outstanding Severino Gazzelloni (1919-1992) it made its way into the chamber repertoire as a stand-alone concert work.