When he was a child, Andrea Bacchetti on piano whistled, hummed, quarrelled. Once, if sound hadn’t gone on, compact, intense, vivid, I would have sworn he had gone away from the piano and had had a walk whistling, led by his curiosity and liveliness. This liveliness is still with him, he seems to live as if a train was going to leave, and the curiosity has grown greater.

He completed very early the official studying of piano, when he was 17, at Paganini Conservatory of his Genoa, with ten plus and mention, he threw himself into the studying of composition, he begun holding high-quality concerts around, in Milan, Saltsburg, Copenhagen, Paris; for example, he habitually played Mozart with Baumgartner during Lucerne Musical Weeks. He chose a specialization teacher and he went to Franco Scala, in Imola: a prestigious Academy and a teacher who knows how to form not only concert artist but also persons. 

When he looks for a deep relationship with contemporary music, Luciano Berio friendly welcomes him and gives him advice. Now that he is 22 he does not whistle on piano any longer, he whispers and zooms only when he let himself go a little. He kept looking like a genius, with very mobile eyes and his hair like that looks like a bush, not like Beethoven or Lord Byron, but, as far as his image is concerned, a bit like Albert Einstein or Archimedes Pitagorico’s comic.

He plays everything. When he starts a piece he already has got the clear map, to the last note, but as the journey into the composition begins, he seems to dive into the musical passage for the firs time.

You can feel his world is neither all into piano at all, nor into music: he read, he meditated, he imagined; and music is the way to make authors answer to the several questions life asked him. Answering, of course, immediately, and so that it can be useful to the listeners.  

This CD leads us totally inside Romanticism. When one is 22 he is far more expert and mature about passion than when he grows up. 

Later, one learns much better “the circumstances when”, “the reasons why”, cultures and hypothesis; he learns to practise aestheticisms and anaesthesias. But the time when one read Leopardi by night and he writes a letter to a friend that the following day he throws away finishes.

The time – I mean – when you feel you have the right, the duty to talk with the Places of each art with no other reason than life. It’s a sacred time, for those who have inner skinless, and it’s very fecund for those who have talent. 

Andrea Bacchetti, who has already recorded four CDs, in a precious way, tries in this CD a self-portrait reflecting himself in the rushing and clear river of great music of 1800. These are moments of different concerts.

A little story comes out, a story to be listened and listened to again. An immediate, pleasant, warm diving into Listz with Consolazione n.3. At once the touch comes into evidence, we feel nostalgia for the note we have just left, and we feel the hurry to go on.

Then, a step backwards in time and the freely chronological order leads us. Rossini’s Tarantella almost paradoxly opens the wideness of romantic imagination: the sweeping sparking off, the memory of a procession that passes through it.

Bacchetti does not belong to that generation that believed in Rossini’s irony as if it was a parlour amusement, the worldly Rossini is one of his many masques, like another Genoese, Mario Nicolao, wrote. The procession comes with the steady cam like at the cinema, it grows greater without emphasis or deformation, and it calls us to children’s prayers that we discover we have not forgotten.

Then of course it’s Chopin’s turn, with Notturno n.27, n.2, the warm major flat Re tone, the singly free notes that are offered naked and precious in secret. There are five Schumann’s pieces, the very young Abegg Variations; Bacchetti tries to read them like Schumann if he had been a young composer’s music: from apparently fragile inventions he had been able to recognize Mendelssohn’s, Chopin’s, Brahms’ genius.

Bacchetti spies the young Schumann, he plays him being an expert of what Schumann wrote, and the Variations get greater, they become promises of mysteries and wonder, confidences of love. 

In this very climate, our player turns the pages of the Album for youth, as if he read verses in a loud voice: the proper shade for each one, the worrying to offer a clear route of notes and pauses and rhythms. It seems we can see him, the pianist, outstretched on keyboard but with his mind concentrated on controlling the right mastery of fingers till the last moment.

Here he is, with the pieces he chose, not popular pieces, - he has so much communicativeness with the audience – not virtuose pieces – where there are passages of high zeal he is able to solve them with clearness an rush. 

Johannes Brahms is proposed to us in two of the most (perhaps) puzzling and delicate moments, among Intermezzi op.116 n.5 with the quick light surfs of the changing harmonies that seems not to come to an and that at last subside as if the last chords could contain them all; …n.6, as if under his fingers arpeggios arose and their restless slow changing created melodies.

The wave of Romanticism gets to our century: it seems that Rachmaninoff  - according to Bacchetti - in Prelude op.32 n.10 and in the Etude – Tableaux op.35, n.5 and 8, wants to go out of it, to make a more unconstrained and disillusioned pleasure, a soundtrack for a world where to venture without loosing the contact with memory and loves.

Instead Gershwin, in the Prelude is already in the new world, that one of a culture born in times and background that some decades before anyone would have never thought of, an America of just emerging remote roots and of a metropolitan daily recurrence… yet he tries, with these notes, the embrace with the great European culture, in Ravel’s name. 

And now the journey ends. 

Andrea Bacchetti takes leave of us his way: a homage to the far father of Romanticism and of our century, Johann Sebastian Bach: an improvisation on Goldberg Variations: the order of universal harmony touches our fantasies, Andrea’s thoughtful and free dreams, and maybe also ours, who knows...