From Friday 21st to Sunday 23rd June, Pordenone will once again resonate with piano music with over 80 concerts of the 6th edition of the Piano City Pordenone Festival. The piano festival is organized by the Piano City Pordenone ETS Committee with the collaboration of the Municipality of Pordenone, the support of the FVG Region, the Friuli Foundation and numerous institutional and private partners.
Concert halls, public spaces, streets, squares and private places will be filled with the notes of over 100 pianists present: internationally renowned soloists, emerging artists, young and very young talents, as well as school students who will compete in the usual relay race for the entire city. And, as usual, all appointments will have free admission while places last.
«In numbers, Piano City is a great event – comments the councilor for culture Alberto Parigi – capable of simultaneously creating a cozy, intimate, elegant and refined atmosphere which gives Pordenone a high-level European dimension. An intelligent event that spreads culture and music in all corners of our city, including businesses and workplaces: a winning formula to play with for the candidacy for Capital of Culture.”
In fact, it starts with the big preview on Saturday 15 June: a Factory Concert at the Molino Zuzzi in Pordenone, where Moses Andrich will perform in the concert The Songs I Love. Then the event will come to life on Friday 21 June at 7pm in Piazza San Marco with the French jazz pianist Edouard Ferlet, who will hold the Pianoïd concert2, a technological musical journey to the frontiers of electronics, contemporary and ambient music. It is an exchange between Man and Machine: using the Diskclavier™, an automated mechanical piano developed by Yamaha around the MIDI language, the musician plays with his virtual double. There will therefore be two pianos on stage: one is in Edouard’s hands, the other is a machine, a sort of mechanical alter ego, precise and rigorous but also deviant and inappropriate. Closing the festival on Sunday 23rd at 9pm in Piazza XX Settembre will be Uri Caine, a musician at the top of contemporary jazz for over 30 years, capable of reinterpreting the sounds of the past with the present, mixing genres and creating a unique, eclectic and always disruptive. In terms of great performers, on Saturday 22nd at 9pm in Piazzetta San Marco, Hanna Shybayeva (a classically trained pianist who often tries her hand at experimentation, jazz and other genres) will perform in a concert that ranges from Gershwin to the rarely performed Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett, while at 7pm in the Court of Palazzo Loredan Porcia you can listen to the improvisations of the Friulian Armando Battiston, the doyen of jazz musicians in the region.
This year the record is reached! There will be 23 city locations where music will be performed: squares, courtyards, historic buildings, cafés, bars and hotels, in the usual division between City Concerts, in traditional places dedicated to live music such as the Convent of San Francesco, the Street Concerts that “invade” public outdoor spaces such as Piazza XX Settembre, Galleria Asquini, the Loggia del Municipio and Piazzetta Pescheria and the House Concerts, hosted in smaller and more intimate private spaces made available by the owners (the courtyards of Palazzo Loredan Porcia , Palazzo Gregoris, Palazzo Policreti, Villa Baschiera Tallon and Casa Zuzzi).
The free pianos could not be missing, which this year number eleven and which, like the last edition, each have a precise name that evokes the place in which they are positioned. They are all free and available to anyone who wishes to propose their own unscheduled concert or delight those walking through the streets of the center with their music.
Inside the festival, Piano’s innovative and visionary appointment with electronics will not be missing! In which on Friday 21 June at 5.45pm at the former Convent of San Francesco, Ciro Longobardi’s piano and Roberto Doati’s live electronics will meet in the Music of electronic changes and refractions. Here, in a world premiere, songs by John Cage will be followed by compositions by Doati. Playful900 – Portrait of Ferruccio Busoni curated by Aldo Orvieto returns to the former Convento San Francesco on Sunday at 4.30pm with 7 young pianists who will take turns playing the keys for a classical music repertoire that pays homage to one of the greatest personalities of contemporary music.
«Every year this event is renewed and improved – confides the mayor Alessandro Ciriani – thanks to an exceptional organizing committee that reflects the soul of Pordenone. If on the one hand the entrepreneurial capacity of its territory has grown over time to become one of the most important realities in Italy, on the other its cultural roots have been enriched with many events including Piano City, which projects our city into a true “piano capital”».
«We are proud that, year after year, Piano City Pordenone is strengthening and establishing itself on the one hand as an event capable of crossing borders, looking towards Europe and, on the other, as an event increasingly loved and experienced by the city and by those who live there – comments Luigi Rosso, president of the Association –. This year we will welcome foreign musicians from Austria, Slovenia, Serbia, Germany, France, Latvia, Holland, China and Indonesia. The selection was very demanding but allowed us to welcome extraordinary excellence, thanks to the large number of applications from pianists who proposed to participate in the festival.”
Piano City renews the synergy with the musical institutions of the territory and with the competitions of the north-east, starting from the Tartini Conservatories of Trieste to the Tomadini of Udine and the Steffani of Castelfranco Veneto. Ample space will be offered to the performances of young winners of international music competitions. In fact, regarding young talents, Piano City represents an important opportunity for them to be heard by an attentive and large audience. At 3.30pm on Saturday 22nd the long-awaited appointment with the Relay of the Schools returns: in 5 locations in the city you will be able to listen to the students of music schools and musical middle schools who will simultaneously compete in the usual relay race, literally running from a piano to the other.
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