Filippo Gorini

Filippo Gorini

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This concert is a dream come true: as a pianist who grew up attending Milan’s concert halls, its festivals and its musical institutions, at Teatro alla Scala I listened to the most beautiful concerts of my life. I am filled with gratitude to Societa? del Quartetto di Milano and Festival Milano Musica for giving me the opportunity to play in a recital right here.

My love for contemporary and nineteen-century music started in the early years of the conservatory, where I studied with Maria Grazia Bellocchio. I believe that facing the works of today's composers with commitment and devotion is, for a pianist, one of the ways to thank the composers of the past, who have come to our ears also thanks to the interpreters of their time. At the same time, confronting today’s composers is one of the most invigorating experiences you can have. Delving into an unknown, sometimes indecipherable scoreboard is an authentic interpretive adventure, and it provides incredible stimulus that change the way even classical authors perceive.

The program of this recital is in complete continuity with my work in recent years and alongside Schubert’s last sonata a retrospective on the music of what I feel to be the greatest composer alive, György Kurtág, together with a fascinating piece by a composer of my own generation. Miharu Ogura.

Schubert’s D960 Sonata is one of the most touching pages of the piano repertoire, a long winter journey suspended on the ridge between this world and the unconscious world, which is based more on dream logics than on a rational and clear path. There are no missing disruptive elements and the charm of a cantability in which rice can sink into the abyss and rise up tenderly even in a single beat, or in the connection of two harmonies.

Kurtág’s Játékok that I have chosen for this concert, however, trace the whole life of the Hungarian composer. If Schubert died at the age of 31, Kurtág had not published a work by that age. Cesellatore capable of creating aphorisms of deep humanity, in the Játékok we find its most intimate language, as if we open pages of a diary, among tributes to other admired artists or friends (including, for example, the wonderful ones to Schubert and Luciana Pestalozza), up to a last song of 2022 dedicated to his wife Márta, who died in 2019. His music language is extremely personal and always strongly poetic.

However, I also wanted to “break” the confidence of these two authors who have now rightly passed into history, and to try to bet on a really young song. Japanese pianist and composer Miharu Ogura composed “Sillage de lignees” in 2022 on the occasion of the Orléans Competition, where she won the prize for best first performance piece. It’s a writing full of charm, nervous, virtuosistic, tight, that with imitative games and a taste for dry sounds draws a very intense piece.

I'm always grateful that I live in a city with such a rich cultural profile. Looking forward to May 9th!