The closing concert of the first Musical Season promoted by the Polli Stoppani Foundation – de Sabata Ceccato Library is entrusted to the prestigious piano duo Michele Campanella and Monica Leone, who will perform Beethoven’s masterpiece Ninth Symphony in Franz Liszt’s ingenious transcription.
Over the course of 2024, a series of nine concerts, of which the December 12 concert marks the last appointment, have retraced the cycle of Beethoven’s nine symphonies in Franz Liszt’s piano transcriptions. The program included a calendar of appointments, every other month, during which the participants were treated to a live concert each time and the screening of a historical film of the symphonies performed during the Bergamo Brescia Music Festival at the Donizetti Theater in 1989 by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Aldo Ceccato.

“With the guidance and help of Maestro Aldo Ceccato and Maestro Michele Campanella,” says Giovanni Gavazzeni, Artistic Director of the festival, “ a valiant handful of Italian pianists led us one by one through Liszt’s ‘transcriptions,’ rightly considered the greatest of their kind in the history of music.” The piano duo formed by Monica Leone and Michele Campanella has no official date of birth, but it is the natural development of the habit of playing together between teacher and student first, between partners in music and in life later. It is the result of a mentality and approach to piano shared from the beginning, having both grown up, at different times, in the school of Vincenzo Vitale.
The ever-expanding repertoire includes music for four hands and two pianos and ranges from Bach to Bartok. Among the most frequently performed pieces are, in addition to an extensive anthology of four-hand music by Schubert, Ferruccio Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, Beethoven/Liszt’s Ninth Symphony, Stravinsky’s Concerto for Two Pianos, Liszt’s Dante Symphony, and Poulenc’s Sonata.
The appearances to be remembered are numerous and significant. From the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome to the Sydney Opera House, from the Coliseum in Buenos Aires to Beijing, Shanghai and Canton, from the Settimana Musicale Senese to the Sagra Umbra in Perugia, from the Teatro San Carlo in Naples to the Orchestra della Toscana in Florence, to the Orchestra da Camera di Padova e del Veneto, to the Orchestra dei Pomeriggi Musicali in Milan, to the Istituzione Universitaria dei Concerti in Rome, to the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, to the Rossini Opera Festival, from the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino to the Cantiere internazionale d’Arte in Montepulciano, to Auckland in New Zealand, and to Melbourne and Brisbane in Australia.

In collaboration with Vittorio Polli and Anna Maria Stoppani Foundation

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