Inspiration: Improvisations for Two Pianos

Paolo Paliaga is a pianist and composer active on the Italian and international music scene with several ensembles. He has recorded around fifteen CDs with Alboran Trio, the Paolo Paliaga Quartet and Horizon Quartet. He studied jazz piano with Sante Palumbo, Arrigo Cappelletti and Enrico Pieranunzi.

He has composed soundtracks performed live for films including Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother and Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan (1924). During several years in France he collaborated with French musicians and recorded with the group Faena. His festival appearances include the London and Brecon jazz festivals, Roma Jazz Festival, the Bergamo and Padua jazz festivals, and the San Javier and Madrid jazz festivals.

With Alboran Trio he was selected among the eight finalists for the BMW Welt Jazz Award in Munich, and performed in Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, Norway and Austria. The group recorded for the German label ACT. In 2008, critic Franco Fayenz described the trio as “the musical event of the year”. His collaborations include Enrico Rava, Barbara Casini, Gianni Basso and Ares Tavolazzi.

His work also encompasses solo piano concerts and appearances on RAI Radio 3’s Invenzioni a due voci, devised and presented by Pino Saulo. His musical exploration continues through Alboran Trio, solo piano and his piano duo with classical pianist Roberto Plano.

He holds a degree in Political Science from Milan and a doctorate in Sociology. His work brings together jazz, European musical traditions and African rhythmic influences. In 2020, Islands received the Gold Prize for Best Jazz Record from the Japanese magazine Jazz Hihyo. In 2022, with graphic artist Jesús de la Iglesia, he created Anthropocene, a performance combining live music with an animation of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Roberto Plano performs internationally with orchestras and at festivals. He won first prize at the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2001, received prizes at the Honens, Dublin, Sendai, Géza Anda and Valencia competitions, and was a finalist at the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. He has also won first prizes at several Italian competitions.

He has appeared on NPR’s Performance Today and on television programmes for PBS and Japan’s NHK. His recordings include releases for Brilliant Classics, Azica, Arktos and Sipario. Two world premiere recordings for Concerto devoted to the rediscovered eighteenth-century composer Andrea Luchesi received five-star reviews in Musica. In May 2016, Amadeus awarded five stars to his Decca recording of Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses.

Plano studied at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatoire in Milan, the École Normale de Musique Alfred Cortot in Paris and the Lake Como Academy. He founded and directed the Associazione Musicale Alfred Cortot, which he co-chaired with his wife, pianist Paola Del Negro. His teaching includes masterclasses at his own academy and internationally; he joined the Boston University faculty in September 2016.

His hometown of Varese has awarded him several distinctions, including the Lumen Claro, also received by soprano Barbara Frittoli, designer Ottavio Missoni and economist Mario Monti. In 2016 he became an honorary member of the Lions Club Varese.

Alexander Scriabin: (b Moscow, 25 Dec 1871/6 Jan 1872; d Moscow, 14/27 April 1915). Russian composer and pianist. One of the most extraordinary figures musical culture has ever witnessed, Skryabin has remained for a century a figure of cultish idolatry, reactionary yet modernist disapproval, analytical fascination and, finally, aesthetic re-evaluation and renewal. The transformation of his musical language from one that was affirmatively Romantic to one that was highly singular in its thematism and gesture and had transcended usual tonality – but was not atonal – could perhaps have occurred only in Russia where Western harmonic mores, although respected in most circles, were less fully entrenched than in Europe. While his major orchestral works have fallen out of and subsequently into vogue, his piano compositions inspired the greatest of Russian pianists to give their most noteworthy performances. Skryabin himself was an exceptionally gifted pianist, but as an adult he performed only his own works in public. The cycle of ten sonatas is arguably of the most consistent high quality since that of Beethoven and acquired growing numbers of champions throughout the 20th century.

Ariel Ramírez (Santa Fe, 4 September 1921 – 18 February 2010) was an Argentine composer, pianist and musical director whose work brought the country’s folk traditions to international audiences. Early in his career he collected melodies in Jujuy and Tucumán, and later toured Europe with programmes of Argentine music. He founded his Compañía de Folclore in 1955 and also served as president of SADAIC, Argentina’s society of authors and composers.

His best-known work, Misa Criolla, sets the Mass in Spanish and draws on Argentine, Bolivian and Peruvian rhythms. Other major projects include Navidad nuestra, Los caudillos, Cantata sudamericana and Mujeres argentinas, created with writer Félix Luna. The latter includes Alfonsina y el mar, one of his most widely performed songs. Ramírez’s music unites distinctive regional rhythms with a melodic language that has reached listeners far beyond Argentina.

Astor Piazzolla: (b Mar del Plata, 11 March 1921; d Buenos Aires, 5 July 1992). Argentine composer, bandleader and bandoneón player. A child prodigy on the bandoneón, Piazzolla and his family emigrated to New York in 1924; in his teens he became acquainted with Gardel, for whom he worked as a tour guide, translator and occasional performer. Piazzolla returned to Buenos Aires in 1937 where he gave concerts and made tango arrangements for Aníbal Troilo, a leading bandleader; he also studied classical music with Ginastera. In 1944 Piazzolla left Troilo’s band to form the Orquesta del 46 as a vehicle for his own compositions. A symphony composed in 1954 for the Buenos Aires PO won him a scholarship to study in Paris with Boulanger, who encouraged him in the composition of tangos; the following year he resettled in Argentina and formed the Octeto Buenos Aires and, later, the Quinteto Nuevo Tango, which performed at his own club, Jamaica. Piazzolla left Argentina in 1974, settling in Paris, where he composed a concerto for bandoneón and a cello sonata for Rostropovich, among other works.
Piazzolla’s distinctive brand of tango, later called ‘nuevo tango’, initially met with resistance. Including fugue, extreme chromaticism, dissonance, elements of jazz and, at times, expanded instrumentation, it was condemned by the old-guard, including not only most tango composers and bandleaders but also Borges, whose short story El hombre de la Esquina Rosada was the basis for Piazzolla’s El tango (1969); like tango itself, Piazzolla’s work first found general approval outside Argentina, principally in France and the USA. By the 1980s, however, Piazzolla’s music was widely accepted even in his native country, where he was now seen as the saviour of tango, which during the 1950s and 60s had declined in popularity and appeal. In the late 1980s Piazzolla’s works began to be taken up by classical performers, in particular the Kronos Quartet, who commissioned Five Tango Sensations (1989). In all he composed about 750 works, including film scores for Tangos: the Exile of Gardel (1985) and Sur (1987). Shortly before his death, he was commissioned to write an opera on the life of Gardel.

Egberto Gismonti: (b Carmo, 5 Dec 1947). Brazilian composer. He began piano studies at the age of six at the Nova Friburgo Conservatory, studying classical music for 15 years. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1968, where he successfully participated in the Third Rio International Song Festival. He then went to Paris to study orchestration and analysis with Nadia Boulanger and composition with Jean Barraqué. After his return to Brazil, Gismonti developed a personal style incorporating Arabian and Italian melodies (his family’s heritage), classical and contemporary music (especially Villa-Lobos and Stravinsky), traditional national genres (folklore, choro, bossa nova), Brazilian Indian themes and jazz. Influenced by the choro, Gismonti taught himself to play the guitar. He has played, recorded and toured throughout the world with several musicians. Since his first recording in 1969 he has made about 50 albums of his own compositions (most released by ECM Records and EMI-Brazil), in which he plays the piano, guitar, various flutes (including Indian instruments), kalimbas and other instruments, winning several prizes. He has also worked as a producer, arranger or player in several other musicians’ recordings. Gismonti’s compositions encompass a great diversity of musical elements and forms, both Brazilian and international, and have been written for solo instruments, ensembles, symphony orchestras, dance, theatre, films, exhibitions and poetic anthologies.

Francisco Tarrega: (b Villarreal, Castellón, 21 Nov 1852; d Barcelona, 15 Dec 1909). Spanish guitarist and composer. When he began the study of the classical guitar with Julian Arcas in 1862, the instrument was at a low ebb throughout Europe, overshadowed by the piano. Tárrega’s father insisted that the boy study the piano as well, and he became accomplished on both instruments at an early age. In 1869 he had the good fortune to acquire an unusually loud and resonant guitar designed and constructed by Antonio Torres, the famous luthier, then living in Seville. With this superior instrument Tárrega was to prepare the way for the rebirth of the guitar in the 20th century. He entered the Madrid Conservatory in 1874, and received a thorough grounding in theory, harmony and the piano. By 1877 he was earning his living as a music teacher and concert guitarist; he gave recitals in Paris and London in 1880, and was hailed as ‘the Sarasate of the guitar’. He married María Josepha Rizo in 1881 and they settled in Barcelona in 1885. Within a few years he displayed a repertory that included, besides his own compositions in the smaller forms, piano works by Mendelssohn, Gottschalk, Thalberg and others arranged for the guitar. The Spanish ‘nationalist’ composers, Albéniz and Granados, were his friends; many of their works were first transcribed for the guitar by him. He also adapted movements from Beethoven’s piano sonatas (including the Largo of op.7, the Adagio and Allegretto from the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata) and half a dozen preludes of Chopin. During the years 1885–1903, Tárrega gave concerts throughout Spain. He toured Italy in 1903. At the height of his fame, in 1906, he suffered a paralysis of the right side from which he never fully recovered. He did, however, appear publicly, and to loud applause, in 1909.

Tárrega’s influence on the 20th century, through pupils who included Emilio Pujol, Maria Rita Brondi and Josefina Robledo, has been tremendous. His compositions for solo guitar, not all of which have been published, comprise approximately 78 original works and 120 transcriptions; he also made 21 transcriptions for two guitars. Among his most famous solos are Recuerdos de la Alhambra (a tremolo study), Capricho árabe and Danza mora.

Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff was an Armenian-Greek spiritual teacher whose work included a substantial body of music, much of it for piano. Music was central to his teaching and to the sacred dances known as Movements. His compositions emerged through collaboration with the Russian composer and pianist Thomas de Hartmann, who developed and notated melodies supplied by Gurdjieff.

Much of their piano repertoire was created between 1924 and 1926 at Gurdjieff’s Institute near Fontainebleau. It ranges from contemplative hymns to dances and pieces evoking the musical traditions of the Near East and Central Asia. Alongside music for the Movements, the collaboration produced independent piano works with evocative titles. These works combine Gurdjieff’s melodic ideas with de Hartmann’s compositional craftsmanship.

György Ligeti: (b Dicsőszentmárton [Diciosânmartin, now Tîrnăveni], Transylvania, 28 May 1923; d Wien, 12 June 2006). Hungarian composer. After being exposed to two tyrannies in his youth, Nazi and Stalinist, he left Hungary following the 1956 Russian suppression of his country’s independence and found himself, in western Europe, confronted by another stern ideology, that of the Darmstadt-Cologne avant garde. The effect was twofold. He was liberated to pursue long-cherished ideals of musical advance, but at the same time his critical, contrary spirit was sharpened. Unlike many of his young colleagues in the west, he was suspicious of system, rejoiced in the delightfulness and evocativeness of sound, and steadily reintroduced – though in quite new ways, guided by an exact ear – things that serial orthodoxy had refused, such as simple harmonies, ostinatos and palpable melodies. Just when this process of recuperation might have led him, in the early 1980s, to join the new dominant movement of postmodernist collage and retrospect, he found further stimulation and contradiction in non-European musical cultures, especially Caribbean, central African and East Asian. Always paradoxical, he found this music of the world enhancing his sense of himself as musically a Hungarian, and began to publish or republish many of the compositions he had written decades earlier.

Johann Sebastian Bach: (b Eisenach, 21 March 1685, d Leipzig; 28 July 1750). Composer and organist. The most important member of the family, his genius combined outstanding performing musicianship with supreme creative powers in which forceful and original inventiveness, technical mastery and intellectual control are perfectly balanced. While it was in the former capacity, as a keyboard virtuoso, that in his lifetime he acquired an almost legendary fame, it is the latter virtues and accomplishments, as a composer, that by the end of the 18th century earned him a unique historical position. His musical language was distinctive and extraordinarily varied, drawing together and surmounting the techniques, the styles and the general achievements of his own and earlier generations and leading on to new perspectives which later ages have received and understood in a great variety of ways.
The first authentic posthumous account of his life, with a summary catalogue of his works, was put together by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel and his pupil J.F. Agricola soon after his death and certainly before March 1751 (published as Nekrolog, 1754). J.N. Forkel planned a detailed Bach biography in the early 1770s and carefully collected first-hand information on Bach, chiefly from his two eldest sons; the book appeared in 1802, by when the Bach Revival had begun and various projected collected editions of Bach’s works were underway; it continues to serve, together with the 1754 obituary and the other 18th-century documents, as the foundation of Bach biography.

Falla Manuel De: (b Cádiz, 23 Nov 1876; d Alta Gracia, Argentina, 14 Nov 1946). Spanish composer. The central figure of 20th-century Spanish music, he addressed over the course of his career many of the salient concerns of modernist aesthetics (nationalism, neo-classicism, the role of tonality, parody and allusion) from a unique perspective. Like many Spaniards, he was attracted to French culture. His predilection for the French music of his time, especially that of Debussy, caused him to be misunderstood in his own country, where conservative-minded critics attacked his music for its over-susceptibility to foreign influences. Reaction to Falla’s music by his compatriots often mirrored the convulsive political changes the country underwent before and during the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), a period of intense cultural activity whose musical manifestations nonetheless remain relatively unexplored.

Paolo Paliaga is a pianist and composer active on the Italian and international music scene with several ensembles. He has recorded around fifteen CDs with Alboran Trio, the Paolo Paliaga Quartet and Horizon Quartet. He studied jazz piano with Sante Palumbo, Arrigo Cappelletti and Enrico Pieranunzi.

He has composed soundtracks performed live for films including Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother and Herbert Brenon’s Peter Pan (1924). During several years in France he collaborated with French musicians and recorded with the group Faena. His festival appearances include the London and Brecon jazz festivals, Roma Jazz Festival, the Bergamo and Padua jazz festivals, and the San Javier and Madrid jazz festivals.

With Alboran Trio he was selected among the eight finalists for the BMW Welt Jazz Award in Munich, and performed in Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, Norway and Austria. The group recorded for the German label ACT. In 2008, critic Franco Fayenz described the trio as “the musical event of the year”. His collaborations include Enrico Rava, Barbara Casini, Gianni Basso and Ares Tavolazzi.

His work also encompasses solo piano concerts and appearances on RAI Radio 3’s Invenzioni a due voci, devised and presented by Pino Saulo. His musical exploration continues through Alboran Trio, solo piano and his piano duo with classical pianist Roberto Plano.

He holds a degree in Political Science from Milan and a doctorate in Sociology. His work brings together jazz, European musical traditions and African rhythmic influences. In 2020, Islands received the Gold Prize for Best Jazz Record from the Japanese magazine Jazz Hihyo. In 2022, with graphic artist Jesús de la Iglesia, he created Anthropocene, a performance combining live music with an animation of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Roberto Plano performs internationally with orchestras and at festivals. He won first prize at the Cleveland International Piano Competition in 2001, received prizes at the Honens, Dublin, Sendai, Géza Anda and Valencia competitions, and was a finalist at the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. He has also won first prizes at several Italian competitions.

He has appeared on NPR’s Performance Today and on television programmes for PBS and Japan’s NHK. His recordings include releases for Brilliant Classics, Azica, Arktos and Sipario. Two world premiere recordings for Concerto devoted to the rediscovered eighteenth-century composer Andrea Luchesi received five-star reviews in Musica. In May 2016, Amadeus awarded five stars to his Decca recording of Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses.

Plano studied at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatoire in Milan, the École Normale de Musique Alfred Cortot in Paris and the Lake Como Academy. He founded and directed the Associazione Musicale Alfred Cortot, which he co-chaired with his wife, pianist Paola Del Negro. His teaching includes masterclasses at his own academy and internationally; he joined the Boston University faculty in September 2016.

His hometown of Varese has awarded him several distinctions, including the Lumen Claro, also received by soprano Barbara Frittoli, designer Ottavio Missoni and economist Mario Monti. In 2016 he became an honorary member of the Lions Club Varese.

On Inspiration, Plano and Paolo Paliaga explore the meeting of composed music and improvisation for two pianos. Their collaborative contributions include Arvo’s World, a homage to Arvo Pärt.