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Plays Busoni and Liszt
Ferruccio Busoni, Franz Liszt

Pietro Scarpini

Plays Busoni and Liszt

Price: € 44.95
Format: CD
Label: Rhine Classics
UPC: 4713106280073
Catnr: RH 007
Release date: 26 June 2020
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Label
Rhine Classics
UPC
4713106280073
Catalogue number
RH 007
Release date
26 June 2020
Album
Artist(s)
Composer(s)
EN
DE

About the album

MusicWeb (UK): This set will appeal especially to aficionado’s of great pianism and will be of added value in enhancing Scarpini’s scant discography. The CDs are complemented with a beautifully illustrated booklet. Rhine Classics have carefully restored and remastered these valuable aural documents in 24bit 96KHz sound.
Gramophone (UK): Piano-wise Rhine Classics has given us a stimulating six-CD set of Pietro Scarpini playing Busoni and Liszt [...] all played with intelligence and the odd tell-tale flashback to old-world performing gestures.
Artalinna (FR): Le disque du jour.
MusikWeb (Vereinigtes Königreich): Dieses Set wird vor allem Liebhaber des großen Klavierspiels ansprechen und einen Mehrwert bei der Aufwertung von Scarpinis spärlicher Diskographie darstellen. Die CDs werden durch ein wunderschön illustriertes Booklet ergänzt. Rhine Classics hat diese wertvollen Tondokumente sorgfältig restauriert und neu gemastert, und zwar in 24bit 96KHz Ton.

Artist(s)

Pietro Scarpini (piano)

Scarpini was Born in Rome in 1911. His mother was a pianist and his father an army officer. He graduated in 1937 from the Accademia di Santa Cecilia where his teachers had been Alfredo Casella for piano, Ottorino Respighi for composition, Alessandro Bustini for conducting, and Fernando Germani for organ. At his graduation concert in 1937, Scarpini was to conduct the orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in the Teatro Adriano in Rome, but ended up replacing the indisposed soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E flat major, K271. The success of this performance led to an offer of three concerto performances with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra at the Philharmonie in Berlin. The reviews referred to ‘an eminent pianist’ and ‘a...
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Scarpini was Born in Rome in 1911. His mother was a pianist and his father an army officer. He graduated in 1937 from the Accademia di Santa Cecilia where his teachers had been Alfredo Casella for piano, Ottorino Respighi for composition, Alessandro Bustini for conducting, and Fernando Germani for organ.

At his graduation concert in 1937, Scarpini was to conduct the orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in the Teatro Adriano in Rome, but ended up replacing the indisposed soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E flat major, K271. The success of this performance led to an offer of three concerto performances with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra at the Philharmonie in Berlin. The reviews referred to ‘an eminent pianist’ and ‘a new star in the international sky of pianists’. Thereafter began an international career, first taking Scarpini to Budapest, Berlin and Lübeck for recitals in 1938, where critics described him as ‘a soloist of the highest stature whose playing is exceptional’. During the war Scarpini was appointed to the Parma Conservatory on Casella’s recommendation but requested a transfer to the Cherubini Conservatory in Florence a year later. At the 1948 Salzburg Festival Scarpini played a work which he would champion throughout his career: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. He played the work for the BBC on his first visit to London the following year and continued to add contemporary works and those of his compatriot, Ferruccio Busoni, to his repertoire. Scarpini’s concerto repertoire list for 1950 includes works by Busoni, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, Dallapiccola, Casella, Petrassi and Ghedini, as well as the more familiar ones by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov.

Indeed, after the war his programmes reflected his interests in contemporary music and the music of Busoni, but he would also programme major works of Bach such as the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 and both books of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier.

A performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in Geneva in 1950 prompted Alfred Cortot to write Scarpini a letter of appreciation in which he said, ‘…c’est une joie pour un musician de mon âge de voir se lever, à l’horizon de son art, une personnalité telle que la vôtre!,’ (‘it's a joy for a musician of my age to see a personality such as yours rise on the horizon of his art!’) and when Furtwängler toured Italy in the years after the war, Scarpini had the opportunity of playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4, Op. 58 with him in Rome during January 1952.

After meeting Scarpini in Florence, conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos invited him to perform in New York in 1954 where they gave three performances of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 16 – a rarely heard work at that date. His health began to fail in 1956 while on another tour of the United States but the following year he performed the new piano concerto by Roger Sessions in Europe. Reducing his concert schedule in the early 1960s, Scarpini performed Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge, BWV 1080 at universities throughout Italy and performed Das Wohltemperierte Klavier complete at the 1960 York Festival in Britain.

After his retirement from the concert platform in the late 1960s Scarpini continued to give masterclasses but a heart operation in 1982 resulted in him only being able to play the piano at home. He died in Florence in November 1997.

During his career Scarpini performed with many great conductors such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Pierre Monteux, Hans Rosbaud, Hermann Scherchen, Ferenc Fricsay and Karl Böhm. He also worked with Hindemith in his youth and had a lifelong friendship with composer Luigi Dallapiccola.

Scarpini was that rare combination: a highly intellectual pianist with a virtuoso technique.
He was a dignified and solitary person with a serious approach to music, single-mindedly following the course of his artistic convictions without compromise.
© 2018 FHR


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Composer(s)

Franz Liszt

If you would open any biography of Franz Liszt, you would probably mostly read about his disquiet life as a piano virtuoso, his passionate love life, and the return to his catholic roots at the end of his life. Although all of this might be true, it only scratches the surface of his comprehensive musical personality. Liszt was a pianist, conductor, teacher and organiser, but above all he was a composer of a voluminous, capricious body of work. Even though his piano works formed his core business, he gave rise to the symphonic poem, got rid of the organ's stuffy appearance, and reinvigorated the oratorio. Moreover, with his piano transciptions of Bach's organ works and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, he was an...
more

If you would open any biography of Franz Liszt, you would probably mostly read about his disquiet life as a piano virtuoso, his passionate love life, and the return to his catholic roots at the end of his life. Although all of this might be true, it only scratches the surface of his comprehensive musical personality. Liszt was a pianist, conductor, teacher and organiser, but above all he was a composer of a voluminous, capricious body of work. Even though his piano works formed his core business, he gave rise to the symphonic poem, got rid of the organ's stuffy appearance, and reinvigorated the oratorio. Moreover, with his piano transciptions of Bach's organ works and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, he was an advocate of both old and new music.
Together with his son-in-law Richard Wagner, he was in the forefront of the Romantic movement and anticipated the musical revolutions of the early 20th century with his new composition techniques.


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Ferruccio Busoni

Busoni was a man with many faces. He was born in Tuscany from a German mother and Italian father, and settled down in Berlin, after visiting Leipzig, Helsinki and Moscow. There he established himself as a composer, but above all a phenomenal pianist. His music shows some discrepancies. On the one hand, he looks back on the Romantic period with his giant pianoconcerto with male choir as the absolute pinnacle. On the onder hand, he looks forward to the future and found that music had to be freed of the chains of outdated ideas. In his much-read manifest 'Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst’ (1907), Busoni sketches his ideal image of music, and in his Six Sonatinas for piano he...
more
Busoni was a man with many faces. He was born in Tuscany from a German mother and Italian father, and settled down in Berlin, after visiting Leipzig, Helsinki and Moscow. There he established himself as a composer, but above all a phenomenal pianist. His music shows some discrepancies. On the one hand, he looks back on the Romantic period with his giant pianoconcerto with male choir as the absolute pinnacle. On the onder hand, he looks forward to the future and found that music had to be freed of the chains of outdated ideas. In his much-read manifest 'Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst’ (1907), Busoni sketches his ideal image of music, and in his Six Sonatinas for piano he presented these ideas musically. In his unfinished opera Doctor Faust, all discrepancies come together as the main character himself is a curious mix of seemingly incompatible elements, just like Busoni.
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