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LUCIANO BERIO  "PIANO WORKS"   -   PRESS REVIEWS 

The idea that the authors of the postwar vanguard had an aversion to the piano, because of its bulky historical inheritance, is one of those commonplaces we should polish off.  Their fund in fact is never lacking of piano pieces and least of all Berio’s one, who never obeyed to the presumed dogmas of that season. Here he is, then, the young, clever player, Andrea Bacchetti, who revives the 5 titles for piano solo: they are pieces which cover 50 years of activity of Ligurian composer (from the 40s to the 90s) where a sharp imagination is supported by the refractions of the harmonic/timbre plan. 

Bacchetti, among other things, matured the performance working in close contact with the master. (E. Gir.)
  

… this very recent Decca CD, perhaps among the first ones presents a wide selection of Luciano Berio’s only pieces for piano. “Difficult” music? Not at all.. And this is the first surprise. The others come opening the libretto. And not only for the player’s name, Andrea Bacchetti, who is more and more mature and becoming a reference point of Italian “pianismo”. Carmelo di Gennaro, a musicology of worth, a Berio’s deep connoisseur besides a friend wrote the complete and easy to be read notes of accompaniment.

Another “sweet”: the marketing manager of the CD is the great Giovanni Mazzucchelli, president of “Quartetto Society” and of “Rossini Academy” of Busto Arsizio.

This is not enough, other well-known names for those who feed on “Musica” appear on its pages: Mirko Garatton, executive producer, and engineer Giulio Cesare Ricci who, with Paola Maria’s assistance, placed at disposal the fine art of his Fonè to record the recital at Imola Academy, with Master Franco Scala’s authorization. 

Very beautiful, really everything was beautiful. Andrea Bacchetti’s piano does not play in front of the speakers, like many others do, but inside and behind them, so that he lets Berio’s fine notes a universal life and a unique color. This music is not heavy at all: it’s the player’s merit, and of the fact that it was recorded with the author’s supervision. … thanks to Andrea Bacchetti we discover Luciano Berio’s wonderful world. Thank you, really thank you to everybody.
  

... an important CD, certified by the esteem Berio felt for Andrea Bacchetti, whose singular and precocious musical intelligence ha had understood, after listening him in Saltsburg, in 1989, and then he had invited him to face his piano compositions. A prestigious and demanding viaticum...
  

Bacchetti was a tiny child, he could not reach the pedal with his feet, and yet he amazed the audience playing with a strong technique and a stubborn confidence. A little Mozart, moved people said coming out of Verdi Hall of Milan Conservatory. Years went by. Bacchetti did not get lost, like it happens to many genius-children. He still has a technique that is very agile, dry, and strong because of a lucid rationality. He oriented his fund with intelligence.  Here he is in a proper and beautiful homage to Berio, with the scores which are set in chronological order ( Petit Suite pour piano, Cinque Variazioni, Sequenza, Rounds, Six Encore pour Piano), in a CD that confirms the imaginative originality of the Master’s writing and the liveliness of piano, the instrument still boasting the greatest literature, that has been unbroken from ‘800 to the present.

Bacchetti is very rigorous in his execution. He has the strictness of the young. In the libretto he quotes Berio’s indications for a not romantic, cold and impassible performance. How sly is Berio!

Cathy Berberian was his greatest player: Andrea, listen to her. She has got a smile behind each note.
  

Andrea Bacchetti today is 27 years old but for Genoese people keen on Classical music is difficult to separate his face and name from the memory of that only 13-years old pianist who, in 1991, astonished the audience of GOG in a Mozart concert offered by Carlo Felice Ensemble. Since that day much time went by, Andrea Bacchetti grew up not only as far as age is concerned. He grew up as a player and today he comes back to the fore publishing a very difficult and beautiful CD: “Luciano Berio: music for piano”, by Decca. A precious CD, that rose from the long and loving haunt that Bacchetti kept with the composer from Imperia (died last May), and that was built, note after note, following his encouragement and his advice.

An homage to the invention that starts from “Petit Suite pour Piano” (1947), goes on with “Five Variations” (1953), with the “Sequenza IV” (1965), with “Rounds” (1967), and ends with “Six Encores pour Piano”, cameos of invention that cover a lapse of time between 1966 and 1990.

- Bacchetti, how was this CD born?

It was born from the interest for the composer but, also and perhaps above all, from an affective matter. I met Berio in 1989 in Saltsburg, I was 11 and he was the guest composer of that year; he listened me play and he wanted to know me. For me that meeting represented a turning point. Berio guided my studies taking an essential role in my formation as a player. 

- How did he it?

Driving me to study those authors who hide in themselves what he called “the germ of musical revolution”. Authors very beloved by Berio, like Boulez, Bach, Mozart, Debussy, Ravel, Strawinsky, Webern …
 

This CD of Berio’s music for piano (in the centre Rounds, the Five Variations and the Sequence IV, between Petit Suite and Six Encores stand out in relief) can be an effective way to open the doors of the most radical contemporary music also to the audience of not-initiated people: first because the player, the very young Andrea Bacchetti born in Genoa in 1977, is out of any vanguard “manierismo” and - yet he has been Berio’s disciple since he was 12 – get to this music with a different and original sensitiveness, mastering with a rush and an amazing exactness a style and a new technique; then because the choice (among the important things only the Sonata per piano of 2001 is absent) is arranged with wily taste of “progressioni” and “accostamenti (parallels)”.

My advice is to begin the listening from the “Encores”, a little collection of “Encores”, quick pieces where the lightings and the glitters of Berio’s piano invention are concentrated on few minutes of immediate seizure for the wise, very measured contacts with tradition … then is better to go to the “Petit Suite pour piano”, by a 20 years old Berio (1947) in love with Ravel, it’s clear, who already possessed that extra fine handicraft that will be one of his favorite field of culture; so, after you learnt to know him well, you can face the most difficult pages, the 50’s and the 60’s, in particular Sequence IV: at once, it seems that somebody gagged the most eloquent among the instruments, the piano, so much restrained and implicit the groups or bunches of sounds (not chords) sound…

For Berio an important homage one year after his death, for Bacchetti a demonstration of very sure maturity.
 

Italian Universal got together three years ago Luciano Berio and a talented soloist, Andrea Bacchetti, to record the composer’s piano work.

The happy intuition was the circumstance, with Berio’s death, of a sort of Baedeker to the stylistic evolution of the author, from Neoclassicism like Nino Rota’s of “Petite Suite” to the serial writing of “Five Variations”, to the stubborn virtuosities of Luftklavier’s “Six Encores”.
  

… in any time, but in particular in ‘900 and contemporary music, the store dues a share - variable but not little – to the interaction between the composers creativity and the player’s availability…

Also Luciano Berio cultivated this relationship for a long time, a relationship which ended in the cycle of the fourteen Sequences: the goad of such an exacting musician, who is ready to get to the limits of mistreatment towards his performers in order to get always the best from them … Perhaps it is less known, but not for this reason less important and even touching, if you refers it to a man who passed off to be surly and difficult, a so called “didactic” projection, an educative versant, of which a young Genoese pianist, Andrea Bacchetti, certainly got a benefit. Now a CD with Berio’s pieces for piano is going to be published in Bacchetti’s executions – recordings that already circulated in a semi-private form, now get in a accurate technical guise to the ultimate consecration of Decca label (a very rare fact for an Italian artist). … Music composed with the big builder’s ratiocination and forethought, leaves room to the person who plays it projected towards utopia, confirming that all funds – and this player more than others – need interpreters rather than executors. Andrea Bacchetti finds a way, that is certainly different from the one practiced by the traditional torchbearers of the contemporaneousness, but his own way, a credible, individual, poetic one, which he likes symbolizing in the light “puntilismo” of Brin, the first of the Six Encores.
  

After commemoration and regrets, here is the joyful time of artistic meditation. The occasion that is represented by this piano route  - which was drawn by Bacchetti with rare love and patience – goes in the right direction. There is a store of heated musical variety (and in its middle we can easily put the two extraordinary works of the 60s, Sequenza IV and Rounds, which were made glimmering of colors and of expressive impatience by the execution) that rewards creatively sumptuous seasons, which let us understand how much awareness the author’s writing was rich of and how much richness a deep and ardent (and also technically very tough and easy) player can offer to the listening.

The series of the last pieces is more enigmatic and sophisticated, if we like: a bit because they cover years that are far by birth but homogeneous for piano sensitiveness, a bit because the blaze of intelligence, of colorist imagination and of musical richness of the first, Brin, which dated 1990, would be enough by itself to put Berio among the big piano composer of the century and to assure to Bacchetti’s performance (which is supported by a seizure of sound of a particular grain timbre- acoustic) a special attention.
  

…these recordings offer very satisfying outcomes, a result also of the regular relationship of the young player with the composer and of his critic scrutiny, that is anything but indulgent, like who knew him knows well. In fact you can grasp all the exactness of the focus of Berio’s particular piano version: it winds through a space that, after the young keen “Petite Suite”, amazed in its neoclassical neatness, seems to draw the diagram of something playful and adventurous at the same time. Bacchetti proves to be very sensitive in his following and at the same time translating into sound these always sharp experimentations, in the “ Five Variations”, in the 4^th “Sequence” in that creative tongue twister that “Rounds” is, without speaking about the spirit which whom he plays that fleeting “Encores”, slightly charming pages, in the mobility of the spectrum they compose and that Bacchetti defines singularly with infallible swiftness. …
  

Andrea Bacchetti goes back almost fifty years of contemporary Italian music, years that are re-built through the extraordinary creative parabola of the Ligurian composer who died last year in May, Luciano Berio.

“The meeting with Berio influenced my musical life in an extraordinary way” Bacchetti said. … The artistic homage the young artist pays to his master benefits from the deep and favorite research that Bacchetti carried on in close contact with the author, exploring each expressive shade and, above all, trying to go inside the innovative mark that characterized Berio’s work.
  

...

- How was this CD born?

On Berio’s advice I started studying his music already in 1990… I started recording it in 1998. Berio told me: “Do it, and then bring it to me”. I prepared the master and then I went to Florence in his study to make him listen to it.

He told me it was not good, I had played the pieces like I felt them… then he explained in a detailed way how they had to be played. In 2000 I recorded the CD again, CD that was later published by Decca. …

- Contemporary music finds difficulties to get its voice listened to. Why doesn’t the audience love it?

Berio used to say that contemporary music is an “elite”, it is not for the mass, it is not a tenor singing romances in a stadium. … The language is the matter. You can’t listen to it with the parameters of traditional classical music. 

What is important is the effect that it gives. And if it is written by genii like Berio, Boulez or Sciarrino it assures great emotions.
 

 CD Reviews   
BERIO. Petite Suite, Five Variations, Sequenza IV, Rounds, Six Encores
A: 9  T: 9    Editor’s choice CD CLASSICS
Compact Disc Classics   September 2004      (Riccardo Risaliti)
 

The young Andrea Bacchetti has always had Luciano Berio’s esteem, at first as a tout court player, then as an interpreter of his own pages… Andrea Bacchetti believes in this music, and this is a good fact, because otherwise he couldn’t play it; above all he couldn’t play it so well, with this perfection of reading and this speaking coherence. I don’t know if one could do better. The CD is accompanied by loving and grateful notes of the player himself, and by a Carmelo Di Gennaro’s hagiography....
  

… Andrea Bacchetti was very bound to Luciano Berio, who came from Liguria like he is. Berio, who had felt this young small, nervous, pianist’s music intelligence, had invited him to face his compositions, to study them under his own guidance, to become the owner of a fund with whom he got the Special Prize Gulbenkian Fondation at Micheli contest in 2001. … Bacchetti offers a very rigorous anti-romantic but vivid performance (mindful of Berio’s recommendations: “Try always to play everything like it is written, even if the metronomes seem impossible; then, the important thing is what will come out”), a performance that can always see the sharp inventive imagination, the infinite “refractions” of the harmonic and timbre schemes. Bacchetti shows a perfect agreement with Berio’s language…
  

A Decca CD of very recent publication, it confirms the story of a love at first sight. In 1989, when he was 12, Andrea Bacchetti holds a recital in Saltsburg. Luciano Berio is present and he becomes his “maitre a penser”. The pieces he recorded, forty years of instrumental though, are studied under the author’s guidance. They are a homage and they are his witness and memory.
  

… the recording witnesses the deep agreement between the author and one his elective players. The "colouristic" splendor of Petite Suite, the driving vehemence of Sequenza and Rounds, the sophisticated virtuosity of the six final pieces would be enough to put Berio among the great composers of our time. And to confirm that Andrea Bacchetti’s sensitiveness and expertise put him in the foreground among the executors of present-day music.
  

This CD, which was recorded between August 2000 and August 2001 in Imola, is a homage to Master Luciano Berio’s skinless and it’s totally dedicated to his composition for piano. … An approval to Andrea Bacchetti’s extraordinary cleverness…
  

 le scelte COMPACT - by Massimo Rolando Zegna   BERIO. Piano works
Decca / 476 194-4 / Universal Music Italia Distribution/ 2000, 2001 / DDD / booklet: good (italian)
Artistic score:   *****   Technical score:   *****
Amadeus   December 2004     (c.f.)
 

The favorite relationship that Andrea Bacchetti could keep with Berio is known. With this CD Bacchetti pays homage to the composer and to the master that had so much importance for his professional growth offering a choice of his pieces for piano. … In the cover notes Bacchetti make us remind how much Berio taught him about the style of execution of the so-called contemporary music and this recording expresses, even at the first listening, all the attention and depth of the interpretative work. … with a self-devotion that we could define “total” Bacchetti aims at mirroring the virtuosity of Berio’s writing in a limpid virtuosity of execution.
  

 Classic     Bacchetti, the young genius repeats Berio’s lesson
Il Giornale    May 27^th, 2005    (Alberto Cantù)
 

Andrea Bacchetti met Luciano Berio in Saltsburg in 1989, … and that was the beginning of an incessant and important haunt; we can say that Bacchetti directly learnt from the composer just that music … that now he commits to a beautiful Decca CD, as a homage to Berio two years after his demise. …there is the whole Berio, his “phonic greed”, the coexistence of tradition and exsperimentalism …

Bacchetti remains faithful with great cleverness to the master’s precepts: “detachment, emotions that were looked for in immobility and there were found”, and “a witty and aggressive touch”. A landmark reading.

 Amadeus Record Price 2005 – The finalists    BERIO. Piano works
Decca / 476 194-4 / Universal Music Italia Distribution 

Finalist in “Contemporary” Section  -  Amadeus, June 2005
 

Eighth edition of “Amadeus Record Price”, an initiative which aims to bring to the notice the most important recordings choosing among the ones reviewed in the twelve issues of the magazine published in the previous year. The editorial office selected the five finalists for each of the five categories: Ancient, Symphonic and Chorale, Chamber, Lyric and Contemporary. …

A jury consisting of Duilio Courir (artistic and cultural Director), Gaetano Santangelo (editorial Director), Massimo Rolando Zegna (Editor of record reviews section), and of three specialized assistants of the sector, (Cesare Fertonani, Nicoletta Sguben e Ruben Tedeschi) … is appointing the winner of each category …

 Review     Record Magic for Luciano Berio
La Cronaca di Mantova     September 9^th, 2005    (Roberto Chittolina)
 

… The further value of the recording is brought about by Andrea Bacchetti’s performance, a 28 years old pianist who can be right considered a faithful and competent performer of Berio’s pages … in several occasions the Master himself showed his complacency for the way Andrea Bacchetti performed his pieces, and that is with “a style – like the genoese pianist explains – lacking of phrasing, …no freedom, immobility, that is to say coldness and impassibility in front of the musical line, that becomes modern since lacking of expression”. …

A very clever performer at keyboards, Andrea Bacchetti, who was elected as a “cantore” by Berio when he was very young … he assimilated the voice and reproposes it with great skill and absolute fidelity.

… Decca CD dedicated to Luciano Berio’s musics for piano in Andrea Bacchetti’s execution, a young yet already great Italian pianist … after his Master’s death some pieces became classic and Bacchetti is the only one (of a certain generation) who was able to meet Him and play them with Him. … He really plays like an “old” pianist, with great measure and confidence, always attentive and reflective …he plays in a wonderful way, with a beautiful sound and with a musicality that is always controlled by intelligence. ...
  

 Classical Music    ClassicCDs  
Luciano Berio’s “Piano Works” by Andrea Bacchetti, Decca
Cittànuova   nr. 23,  December 10^th, 2005   (Mario Dal Bello)
 

... the young pianist Andrea Bacchetti has a clear touch, a phrasing that is given to “embroidery”, a precise sense of dynamics: his “pianismo” is played on rationality, on the search for the infinite possibilities of the single sound, where sensitivity is dominated by the very lucid control of colour and shading. Bacchetti is an architect of sound and his Berio fits like a glove. A record you can’t miss.