by Alessio Zuccaro
There are musicians who collect concert halls, mountaineers who collect peaks, and there are those who manage to do both: such as Andrea Molteni, from Como, born in 1998, a young Italian pianist who has been climbing (it really has to be said) the peaks of international success for the past few years. This year he will participate in Cremona Musica International Exhibitions and Festival with a concert scheduled for Sept. 28 at 1 p.m. at the Stradivari Hall, where he will perform Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sonata op. 106 Hammerklavier.
In his still short career, he has already produced valuable works, such as the recording of the complete piano works of Goffredo Petrassi and Luigi Dallapiccola, for the Brilliant Classics label. How did the project come about?
The idea of recording a disc goes back to the covid period: that year and a half of inactivity gave me an opportunity to study the complete works of Petrassi, a seminal composer whom I believe to be an underrated genius. With Brilliant Classics we then came up with the idea of working alongside Dallapiccola, a composer with whom Petrassi shares both age [they are both 1904, ed.] and Baroque influences. It is a project that allowed me to discover such gems as Petrassi’s piece Oh Les Beaux Jours!, from 1976, which I performed as an encore on my recent tour in China to considerable success.
Another important project is the record Beethoven: With Some Licenses, where he performs a piano version of the Great Fugue op. 133. Are there aspects of this monumental work that the piano brings out better than the string quartet?
Again, the idea of recording this transcription came out of dialogue with the label. Initially I thought I would limit myself to a classic pairing of Beethoven’s discography: op. 106, known as the Hammerklavier, together with op. 110. Then we discovered a crazy arrangement of the Great Fugue, by German pianist Louis Winkler, and decided to include it. It is a fascinating transcription, the merit of which, in my opinion, lies in the fact that it is easier to distinguish the various themes and registers than the enigmatic original version.
In addition to being a career pianist, you have a great passion for mountaineering-what excitement does this activity give you?
Yes, I have managed to climb several 4,000-meter peaks, including Mont Blanc from the Italian side – without a cable car, hiking up to 12 hours a day. Certainly it is a sport that gives you great adrenaline, but what I love most about these places is their power to make you realize the true dimension of man: we think we are at the center of the world, but we are not at all.
In cooperation with TGmusic.it
