Great Performers: Aldo Ciccolini
To mark Erik Satie's 1966 centenary, the EMI label's artistic director suggested to Aldo Ciccolini that the pianist record some of his music. At the same time, the director warned "if we sell 200 copies, it will be a miracle." As it happened, the recording became a best seller, instigating a complete Satie cycle that forever linked the composer to Ciccolini.
Read more…As much as Ciccolini expressed his passionate fondness for Satie, it would be wrong to peg the pianist as a Satie specialist, or a specialist in anything, for that matter. Born in Naples on August 15th1925, Ciccolini gravitated towards the family's piano at an early age. At nine, he entered the Naples Conservatory. His teacher, the Busoni disciple Paolo Denza, insisted that his young student play the fugue from Beethoven's monumental Hammerklavier Sonata every morning, a practice Ciccolini kept up all of his life. In 1949 Ciccolini went to Paris to enter the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition, not expecting to win first prize. Yet Ciccolini's victory launched an international career, beginning with an eight-month American tour and the first of his many recordings.
Ciccolini always credited Long as a mentor, along with pianists Alfred Cortot and Yves Nat. As a longtime professor at the Paris Conservatoire, Ciccolini himself became a mentor to numerous keyboard luminaries, including Nicholas Angelich and Jean-Yves Thibaudet. ''His lessons weren't just piano lessons, '' recalled Thibaudet, ''they were lessons in living.''
Ciccolini's prolific discography embraces an unusually large, eclectic and all encompassing repertoire that reflects the openness and curiosity that fueled his long career. His first foray into the recording studio resulted in a delightful Scarlatti recital; Ciccolini called this composer a ''jovial troublemaker.'' The pianist's affinity for traditional Spanish music no doubt informed his way with the volatile expressive scope and textural richness characterizing Albeniz's Iberia and Granados' Goyescas. By contrast, Ciccolini's inherent classicism and technical control also suits the poise and transparency of Mozart's piano music.
Ciccolini also proved a loving and stylish advocate for the virtually unknown yet charming and thoroughly idiomatic keyboard output of Massenet and Severac. The appropriately dry élan he brought to Saint-Saëns' piano concertos, D'Indy's Symphony on a Mountain Air and Franck's works for piano and orchestra contrast to the fuller-bodied power of his Rachmaninov Second and Tchaikovsky First Concertos. His virile, sometimes aggressive manner with Grieg's Lyric Pieces and the early Op. 7 Sonata evoke Grieg's playing of his own music. Those expecting impressionistic haze and half tints in Debussy's complete piano works may not appreciate Ciccolini's broader brush strokes and blunter, neo-Prokofiev edges, notably in the pianist's later recorded versions. However, Ciccolini's expressive and tonal reserves almost always opened up with Liszt; listen to his stereo version of the Années de Pèlerinage, for example. Also seek out Ciccolini's chamber and song collaborations to sample what congenial musical partnership ought to be. In short, there's more to Ciccolini than his justly acclaimed Satie interpretations, and plenty of music making to keep listeners busy and engaged for hours. As Jean-Yves Thibaudetso aptly summed up, 'People so supremely cultured, so at ease in every possible field, are very rare nowadays.'