VA - Gorini: Works for Strings & Piano (2015)

Gino Gorini, pianist and composer, was a pupil of Gino Tagliapietra and, from 1934 to 1940, of Gian Francesco Malipiero. Tagliapietra was an inheritor of the monumental piano style of Ferruccio Busoni and Egon Petri, who had updated the philosophy of musical performance by criticising late-romantic liberties. Gorini admired him as a virtuoso rather than as a performer, because he did not like his ardent expressiveness and disagreed with personality cult: the latter was largely rejected by the new pianists who were close to modern composition. Gino Gorini was a neoclassical pianist; his objective notion of performance, his anti-romantic attitude and his non-exhibitionistic virtuosity reflected Malipiero’s ideas. He was open to all repertories, even beyond the historical twentieth century. Malipiero appreciated the outstanding variety of his programmes, so much so that he used to say, “Stars are forced, in order to keep their clientele, always to perform the same music for the same public,” as an indirect acknowledgement of the value of his pupil’s musical choices. There was no distinction between Gorini the performer and Gorini the composer: the two activities were interdependent. Obviously a crucial element was Gorini’s apprenticeship with Malipiero, when, at the age of twenty, he followed Malipiero’s memorable courses at the Liceo Musicale Benedetto Marcello of Venice.