2 CD
✓ in stock |
€ 28.95
|
Buy |
Label Rhine Classics |
UPC 4713106280141 |
Catalogue number RH 014 |
Release date 02 August 2019 |
The Italian pianist Pietro Scarpini was born in Rome and first studied piano with his mother before going to the Accademia di Santa Cecilia at twelve. There his teachers were Alfredo Casella for piano, Bernardino Molinari for conducting, Alessandro Bustini and Ottorino Respighi for composition and Fernando Germani for organ.
From his Italian debut (2 November 1937), playing Mozart’s Concerto K.271, Mario Medici’s Piano Concerto and Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody with the Orchestra Stabile della Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia under Molinari at the Teatro Adriano in Rome, immediately followed by appeareances with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, he has been heard all over Europe.
He was keenly interested in chamber music and in 1947 founded the “Pierrot Lunaire ensemble” which gave thirty concerts of Schoenberg’s work in Salzburg, Milan, Rome, Florence and in other musical centres in Europe. In the 1930’s he collaborated also with Paul Hindemith during his Italian tournées. During World War II he refused to play under the Fascist and Nazi regimes, and in 1954 he made his first trip to America to appear with the New
York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, under Dimitri Mitropoulos playing Prokofiev’s 2nd Concerto. He gave many first performances of works by modern composers, including Ghedini, Dallapiccola, Sessions, Peragallo and Petrassi, and in 1948 the first Italian performance of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto in Turin. Scarpini’s versatility defies classification: audiences who have heard him playing Beethoven (4th Concerto) under Furtwängler have seen in him the true interpreter of the classics; those who have attended his performances of contemporary music believed that he was perhaps the only pianist able to do full justice to the moderns. He has mastered works such as Bach “Well-Tempered-Klavier”, “Art of Fugue” (1955) and “Goldberg Variations” (Busoni’s version) or Beethoven “Diabelli Variations”andatthesametimedevotedfull recitals to the work of Busoni and Scriabin. Scarpini was also a dedicated teacher, in the Summer Masterclasses of Siena’s Accademia Chigiana (1948-50, 1968-71), in the “International Vacation Courses for Modern Music” at Darmstadt (1952) as well at the Conservatoires of Florence, Milan and Rome (1939-1971).