PIETRO SCARPINI
Italian pianist (1911 - 1997)

Pietro Scarpini was called "a pianist of prodigious capacities" by New York Times critic Olin Downes after the performance of the Prokofiev 2nd concerto.  Though he studied conducting at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, as well as composition with Casella, to whom the Busoni Op 54 is dedicated, and with Respighi, it is as a pianist that realized his ultimate talent.

Pietro Scarpini's performance of Beethoven's last piano sonata is alive in a way that the typical performance is not.  He allows the music to speak, and yes dance, rather than the almost oppressive need seemingly felt by so many pianists to pay homage to this ultimate monument of Beethoven's creative output.  I have never heard it played this way and fear I may never again.

The 4th piano concerto has a lightness of intensity that is remarkable, as though Pietro Scarpinin were confronting it for the first time and matching the elasticity of Furtwängler's conducting to create a perfectly integrated performance, at time following the great conductor's lead, at times anticipating what he will do next.  This is one of the most perfect pianist/conductor pairings I know.  And the recording of the Brahms second concerto, well suffice it to say that Brahms might have made a surprisingly good Italian opera composer.

As for the music of Ferruccio Busoni, never have I heard the Italianate essence of the composer so vividly manifested as at Pietro Scarpini's hands.  Busoni's music is so often played in a heavy handed manner.  His Prokofiev is quite different from the mainstream, and wonderful as are the pieces by Liszt, Scriabin and Rachmaninoff.

At the end is a clip from a rehearsal of a concerted work by Busoni and an exciting piano concerto by the 20th century Italian composer, Goffredo Petrassi.

Mozart Piano Concerto 22 in E♭ major, K 482
Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra

i Allegro
12:46  ii Andante
21:44  iii Allegro

recorded live in 1955