Immediately with her first CD the Italian pianist Pina Napolitano made a splash in early 2012: Norman Lebrecht featured her recording of Arnold Schönberg’s complete piano works as his “CD of the week”, shortlisting it for his Album of the Year on Sinfinimusic.com, Guy Rickards in International Piano Magazine called the CD simply “outstanding”, citing the “tensile strength to her playing that is distinctly hers”, and Calum MacDonald in BBC Music Magazine gave it five stars for its “rare penetration, understanding, grace and elegance.” Pina Napolitano is, through her teacher Bruno Mezzena, a grand-student of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, and has experienced huge successes with performances of Liszt, Ravel and Bartók.
For some time now, though, the center of her attention has been the music of the Second Viennese School. Unlike many performers, she considers this music not to be a primarily intellectual adventure, but a highly emotional and expressive one – “wholly saturated with expression” (Österreichische Musikzeitschrift), a “perfect conjunction between microcellular dissection and almost heartbreaking expressive sensitivity” (Ritmo), a “heady romanticism both irresistible and unsettling” (Arts Desk).
She is especially interested in the retrospective view looking from today, via early modernism, at the works of the romantic and classical period. She enjoys programming the music of Schönberg, Berg and Webern alongside works of Mozart and Brahms for instance. Not only does she impress her public with intellectual clarity, elegance and beauty of tone, but also with her virtuosity and an unusual feat of memory: she plays everything by heart – not to impress her public, but to create an atmosphere of utmost concentration, that, in her own experience, captures the public’s intense attention throughout.
Pina Napolitano performs extensively in Europa and Russia. With the Philharmonic Orchestra of Pescara she performed Liszt’s 2nd Piano Concerto and Bartòk’s 3rd. With an ensemble of the same orchestra she played in Ivan Fedele’s “La chute de la maison Usher”, directed by Marco Angius. Her music has been broadcast by Radio France Classique and presented live by Rai Radio 3.
After studying with her first teacher, Giusi Ambrifi, in her native Caserta, near Naples, she attended masterclasses in piano with Tibor Egly, Bruno Canino, and Alexander Lonquich, and in musical analysis with Giacomo Manzoni and Hugh Collins Rice (Oxford University). She then entered the Pescara Musical Academy, where she graduated in Piano Solo Performance and in Twentieth-Century Piano Music with Bruno Mezzena.
While studying piano, she earned two B.A.s from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” in Classical Philology and in Slavistics, both times with top marks and lauds. In 2010 she received her doctorate in Slavistics with a thesis on the poetry of Osip Mandel’štam, which won the 2011 Italian Slavists’ Association prize. She published an article on the Šostakovič cycle Op. 143 “Six poems of Marina Cvetaeva” in which she explored the connections between the poetic and musical text, and recently translated for the first time into Italian the notebooks of poetess Marina Cvetaeva for the Italian press Voland Edizioni.
In the near future, alongside studying Ravel and Brahms, she is planning to record with Odradek Records Schönberg’s piano concerto coupled with Stravinsky’s Movements, as well as a solo program with works of American composers Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Eric Moe and Jeffrey Mumford.
Besides her performance activity, she teaches at the Alban Berg Music Academy in Pescara and at masterclasses in Europe and Russia, while frequently serving as a jury member to international competitions.
