ICMC Festival

Maestro Aldo Ciccolini
Aldo Ciccolini is one of the few great international pianists of our times to have pursued an international career for over 50 years, since his early success in the Marguerite Long / Jacques Thibaut competition. Neapolitan by birth, he has earned a reputation as a mastered interpreter of French music. Indeed his early pioneering recordings of the piano works of Eric Satie for EMI have earned him recognition beyond the world of the classical concert hall, and they remain to this day the most popular recordings of twentieth-century piano music ever made. Through nearly 100 recordings for EMI-Pathé Marconi, Aldo Ciccolini has bought to light works that were unjustly neglected at the time of release, such as the sonatas of Schubert and Scarlatti and Liszt’s Les Années de Pélerinage, or little known, as in the case of Satie. He has also recorded the complete Mozart sonatas, the complete sonatas of Beethoven, and the complete works for piano of Janácek, Debussy, Massenet and Satie. In 2002 he was awarded two Diapasons d’Or by the French record magazine Diapason : at the beginning of the year for his Janácek album and in October for his Schumann album. A third Diapason d’Or was awarded in the 20 best-selling classical CDs in France. His recent release of the complete Grieg Lyric Pieces was awarded Le Grand Choc By Le Monde de la Musique. At the age of 80, Ciccolini’s concert diary is a busy as ever, his international career taking him to numerous venues throughout Europe and the Far East during 2005/6 and 2006/7. He has performed under many great conductors, including Fürtwängler, Mitropoulos, Erich Kleiber, Pierre Monteux, Sergiu Celibibache, Carlo-Maria Giulini, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Ernest Ansermet and more recently Daniel Gatti, Sir Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink and Christoph von Dohnanyi. Ciccolini was for thirty years a professor at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris. He is still active as a teacher and regularly gives masterclasses particularly in his native Italy.