The enchanting piano world of Niccolò Castiglioni: the music of this sensual aphorist encompasses a range from a naively childlike tone to sharp-edged expressiveness. Castiglioni (1932-1996), continuing the tradition of composing interpreters (once upon a time a common phenomenon), was himself a brilliant pianist – a crucial contributing factor to the creation of his piano oeuvre. Between 1958 (his first appearance at the Darmstadt courses, performing his piece for piano Inizio di movimento, which is included on col legno's CD box 50 Jahre Darmstadt) and 1994 he composed ten works/cycles for piano solo. They range from works of unparalleled expressiveness such as Cangianti (1959) to the extremely concise, aphoristic, blink-of-an-eye pieces of his later years, like In principio era la danza (1989). Over the years he allowed his playful, poetical and nature-loving side to come to the fore with increasing frequency, for example in Come io passo l’estate (1983), a suite for "beginners" (gently recalling Schumann's Kinderszenen or Bartók's Mikrokosmos), or in his Sonatina (1984). While his preference for a dogged, solidifying insistence on one chord is particularly marked in He (1990) or Preludio, corale e fuga (1994), his partiality to the higher registers of the piano is evident in nearly all his works: "By an association of ideas, the high register recalls cold, ice and snow, elements that are part of Castiglioni's poetical imagination. The cold, though, has nothing hostile about it; it is healthy and beneficial, conveying the charms of a winter landscape and the beauty of that which is pure." (Alfonso Alberti) And this stunning effect is not least owed to the interpretational tour de force undertaken by the Italian pianist Alfonso Alberti with a virtuosity that matches his devotion, assembling the complete piano works by Castiglioni on one album for the first time. |