The Gina Bachauer International Piano Foundation will close its 2024-25 concert season with Pasquale Iannone, from Italy and who is well known as a Bachauer laureate and juror along with being the teacher of the student who won the 2012 young artists’ competition here.
The April 11 program (7:30 p.m., Jeanné Wagner Theatre, Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts) is titled Moments Musicaux, with selections by names intimately familiar to Bachauer audiences — Beethoven, Chopin, Rachmaninoff — as well as a piece by Moriz Rosenthal, a Polish pianist and composer who studied with Liszt and whose career spanned the last third of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
In addition to performing recitals, chamber music concerts and as soloist with orchestras around the world, he is a well known teacher with many students having gone on to win prizes at numerous international competitions. His recordings for the Phoenix Classical label have been well received. Iannone took fifth prize in the 1994 competition and then one of his students, Leonardo Colafelice, came to Salt Lake City 18 years later to take the top prize in Bachauer’s Young Artists Competition. Today, both men are on the faculty at the Niccolò Piccinni Conservatory of Music in Bari, Italy.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Iannone talked about his love of teaching, the experiences of judging a piano competition and organizing festivals and other music events in Italy. “For me, all of these activities are satisfying for me as a musician,” Iannone said. As a teacher, he views himself as a strict father figure when it comes to music but he also prioritizes building positive relationships with his students, especially when it comes to thinking about what life might be like if they decide to pursue a career in music, especially as a concert pianist. For instance, he started teaching Colafelice, when the student was 10 years old. Now, Iannone is delighted to have his former student as a conservatory faculty colleague.
Iannone said he believes students benefit from the experience of having the same teacher from their younger years up until the age of 16 and 17. He talked fondly about one of his students who at the age of 11 played Beethoven’s first piano concerto at a summer festival that he organized, where he also conducted an orchestra for the first time with his student as concerto soloist. A good number of his students have fared well on the international competition circuit. In addition to Bachauer, his students have won prizes in the Eastman Young Artists International Piano Competition, Thomas & Evon Cooper International Piano Competition, the International Fryderyck Chopin Piano Competition for Children and Youth (Szafarnia, Poland) and Young Pianist of the North (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.), among others.
When he was invited as a juror in Bachauer’s International Artists Competition in 2014, he developed his own Excel spreadsheet to guide him in deciding how to cast his votes of ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ for each pianist’s performance. He developed a spreadsheet with 14 elements that he believes are essential for performances that can be judged as distinguished in the competition. “It worked so well that I continue to use it to this day whenever I am invited as a juror,” he added.
In programming his recital, Iannone dedicated his first half to the serious musical stalwarts that one might expect from any pianist proving their virtuosic mettle in technique, style and interpretation. Citing Beethoven as his personal music hero, Iannone will open with the Appassionata Sonata (Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57). The 25-minute work is an emotional roller coaster of sorts with extraordinary technical challenges, which many pianists believe outdo those presented in Beethoven’s even more famous Moonlight Sonata. The outer movements feature episodes of relentless intensity while the second movement also displays that profound, essential rhythmic essence which always defines the composer’s music.
Likewise, Chopin — whom Iannone admires for the technical skill of building rubato expressiveness into his music — will be represented by two quintessential examples from the composer’s repertoire: Polonaise-Fantaisie, op. 61 and Scherzo No. 4 in E Major, op. 54.
The second half selections are brighter and happier amusements with mature grasps of epic skill and musicianship. Rachmaninoff’s Six moments musicaux, op. 16 were completed in 1896, just four years after he had completed his studies at the Moscow Conservatory and these pieces signal the maturing promise that would come to fruition in his later sets of Préludes and the Études-Tableaux. Iannone concludes with a Viennese flair, in Rosenthal’s Carnaval de Vienne (Humoresque sur des themes de Johann Strauss). Rosenthal, who was technically gifted as his contemporaries including Rachmaninoff and Medtner, freely improvised on Strauss themes by playing multiple waltzes simultaneously with both hands, the results which thoroughly pleased the original waltz composer.
For tickets and more information, see the Bachauer website.