Mozart Italia Castelli Romani and Off the Hook Arts are pleased to present:
The Bösendorfer Recitals
Featuring pianist Carlo Grante.
Join us this spring for six remarkable free concerts live-streamed straight to you. On the magnificent Bösendorfer 280 Vienna Concert piano in the beautiful concert hall Casa Delle Culture e Della Musica in Velletri, pianist Carlo Grante will perform Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, and more. Prior to each recital, special guest Bruce Adolphe will join Grante for a short discussion and Piano Puzzler based on each concert’s repertoire and composer. You won’t want to miss it!
11:30pm MST / 1:30pm EST Live Streaming (with re-broadcasting available for one week following each recital)
Carlo Grante
Carlo Grante is one of Italy’s foremost concert pianists. He has performed in such major venues as the Vienna Musikverein, the Berlin Philharmonie’s Chamber Music Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall and Barbican Hall, Rome’s Santa Cecilia Hall, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Dresden Semperoper, the Stuttgart Opera, Prague’s Rudolfinum, as well as at Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center in the US. He has appeared as soloist with major orchestras including the Dresden Staatskapelle, London’s Royal Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony, Orchestra of St. Cecilia, MDR Leipzig, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and Concertino Wien. Grante gave the first live performance of all 53 of Godowsky’s Studies on the Études of Chopin at the Newport Festival. In 2014-15 his series “Masters of High Romanticism”, featuring three recital programmes each devoted to Chopin, Schumann and Brahms, was taken to major halls in New York, Vienna and Berlin. Though best known perhaps for his Scarlatti, Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Busoni, Debussy and Godowsky, Grante has had many contemporary works dedicated to him, including Adolphe’s Chopin Dreams. He has brought out over 60 CDs; his most recent discs have been devoted to the works of Scarlatti, Busoni, Schubert, Brahms, Godowsky and Adolphe. He gave the world premiere of Bruce Adolphe’s piano concerto in Zurich in July 2016.
The New York Met’s Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi wrote of him in 2015 that “Carlo Grante is one of the most astonishing artists I have ever known and worked with.” The principal critic of Vienna’s Die Presse dubbed him “a knight of the piano, without blemish and without fear.”
Bruce Adolphe
Composer Bruce Adolphe — known to millions of Americans from his public radio show Piano Puzzlers, which has been broadcast weekly on Performance Today since 2002 — has created a substantial body of chamber music and orchestral works inspired by science, visual arts, and human rights. Mr. Adolphe has composed several works based on writings by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio: Body Loops (piano and orchestra); Memories of a Possible Future (piano and string quartet); Self Comes to Mind (solo cello and two percussionists); Obedient Choir of Emotions (chorus and piano); and Musics of Memory (piano, marimba, harp, guitar). Yo-Yo Ma premiered Self Comes to Mind in 2009 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Mr. Adolphe’s other science-based music include Einstein’s Light for violin and piano, recently recorded by Joshua Bell and Marija Stroke on Sony Classical, and his tribute to NASA scientist and astronaut Piers Sellers, I saw how fragile and infinitely precious the world is, which received its world premiere at the Off the Hook Arts Festival in Colorado in 2018 and was performed at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in March, 2019. Among his human rights works are I Will Not Remain Silent for violin and orchestra and Reach Out, Raise Hope, Change Society for chorus, wind quintet, and three percussionists. Mr. Adolphe is the resident lecturer and director of family concerts for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the author of several books, including The Mind’s Ear (OUP). He contributed the chapter “The Musical Imagination: Mystery and Method in Musical Composition” to the recently published book Secrets of Creativity: What Neuroscience, the Arts, and Our Minds Reveal (OUP, 2019), an anthology of writings by neuroscientists and artists.
Mozart Italia Castelli Romani
The main purpose of Mozart Italia Castelli Romani is to deepen and develop the studies on the life and work of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
From publishing previously unpublished writings and new Mozart studies to organizing lectures, the members of AMI work to develop knowledge of the composer in many ways. Discussions stimulated by a lecture, concert, or simply the serenity of listening to Mozart’s works are one of the benefits members of AMI enjoy. Associazione Mozart Italia spreads love and knowledge about Mozart throughout the various cities of Italy through concerts featuring young musicians.
Associazione Mozart Italia is specifically focused on studying the “Italian” Mozart; his travels in Italy and the influences that derived from that period of his life. We firmly believe that Mozart without Italian influence would lose much of its depth.
Bösendorfer
The ethos of Bösendorfer goes right back to 1828 and the founding of the company. Bösendorfer is passionate about crafting pianos, ultimately sharing a unique experience of sound, touch and – foremost – emotion. Uncompromising traditional handcrafting, beauty, and the Viennese soul all bring the unmistakable depth of a Bösendorfer to life.
Today Bösendorfer pianos are recognized as one of the premier performance pianos in the world. Contrary to all other manufactures Bösendorfer constructs instruments concentrating on the use of spruce; with about 80% of a finished piano comprised of the wood. Very similar to a violin, the whole body – not exclusively the soundboard – supports sound formation. When a note is played, the integrated spruce components become acoustically active, forming a complete resonating body that allows the whole instrument to project your play. This is what produces the Bösendorfer outstanding richness of tone color and legendary pure and brilliant sound. This complex construction is part of the Viennese tradition of piano making.
