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Sergio Fiorentino Memorial Site II

S E R G I O   F I O R E N T I N O

pianist  &  musician

Reactions to his concerts appearances

Tuesday night in The Breakers Fiorentino opened the Newport Festival by making his first American appearance in 43 years. A courtly gentleman with an aureole of white hair, Fiorentino looks like a pianist in an old movie - or like photographs of the German pianist Wilhelm Kempff. Fiorentino, like Horowitz or Dubravka Tomsic, is undemonstrative at the keyboard; he doesn't have time for theater, because there is so much color and drama in the actual playing.

The first half of the recital was "serious", the second devoted to entertainment - but these are false distinctions. Fiorentino's performance of the Schumann "Fantasy" was architecturally sound, but it was also full of darting, unexspected departures and a sense of play. And like the great pianists of the past, Fiorentino doesn't play transcriptions of waltzes to show off his virtuosity but to celebrate the waltz in all its intricate, teasing glory.

The pianist opened with his own arrangement of a Busoni transcription of a Bach Prelude and Fugue in D (BWV 532) for organ. The fugue theme seems as unpromising as a five-finger exercise. With inexorable momentum Bach develops it into a vast and majestic edifice; Fiorentino recapitulated this progress by building a masterly crescendo of volume, color and intensity. Fiorentino's performance of the Schumann held a richness of feeling and substance that can only come from the interaction of deep intuition, profound study and extensive experience. The march had a superb snap; the intrusion of caprice into the trio was captivating; and Fiorentino's handling of the difficult skips at the end was so exhilarating that the audience burst into applause, the way people invariably do after the march in Tchaikovsky's "Pathétique" Symphony. Then like the greatest conductors of Tchaikovsky, Fiorentino made the real climax the quiet welling up of emotion in the last movement, which he played with a gloriously vocal quality of tone, spacious phrasing and a matchlessly melting legato.

The waltzes were the Liszt version of the Kermesse from Gounod's "Faust", Fiorentino's transcriptions of a Tchaikovsky waltz and a sequence of waltzes from "Der Rosenkavalier", Tausig's transcription of Strauss' "Man lebt nur einmal!" and the masterpiece fo the genre, Godowsky's "Symphonic Metamor- phoses on Themes from Die Fledermaus". Fiorentino neatly discriminated among the various national styles; and his iridescent scales, glissandi, arpeggios, chords, double notes, and octaves, his opalescent shifting harmonies, and his superbly secure and supple rhythmic sense wre not virtuoso tricks but ornaments devised to dramatize the curve of each dance in delirious movement.

In the Godowsky, Fiorentino was not as translucent as Benno Moiseiwitsch, recorded in 1928; in the Tausig, not as exhilarating in attack and rhythm as Rachmaninoff, recorded in 1927. But Fiorentino dramatized the contrapuntal mastery of Godowsky more vividly than Moiseiwitsch, and his Tausig had more vocality and whimsy than Rachmaninoff's; his playing is of similar classic stature. Few in the audience can have heard anything like this in live performance, so there was an encore - the big Chopin Waltz in E-flat, this time, for sure, a Grande Valse Brillante.

__________________________________________________Richard Dyer (The Boston Globe, July 1996)

For lesser pianists, trying to recoup past glories late in life might have spelled disaster. But not for the 68-year-old Fiorentino, who had no trouble tossing off a huge and taxing program at The Breakers. He still has great chops. Listeners who packed the former Vanderbilt mansion got to hear Fiorentino's blazing technique in a slew of flashy waltz transcriptions that turned up on the second half of the two-hour program.

There aren't too many pianists half Fiorentino's age who could dispatch Leopold Godowsky's note-clotted Fledermaus paraphrase with such ease and panache. The more he played, the looser he seemed to get. And never, during all the octave rund, the fistsful of chords, did Fiorentino produce an ugly or harsh sound - even on the festival's glassy Yamaha grand.

But just as impressive was his poetic soul. Then opening passages of Schumann's Fantasy gushed with longing, while the dreamy finale was spellbinding, a beautifully paced, lovingly shaped rendition. The pianist's own lilting arrangement of waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier just rolled off his fingers. Not too many pianists play this once-popular repertoire any more. It's music that belongs to a bygone era of pianism, when performers knew how to make something out of a piece of music and not just connect the dots.

I suppose you could call Fiorentino - diminutive and rather stonefaced - old-schoolish. Lots of liberties were heard in his encore, a Chopin waltz of ever-changing moods and tempos. But he is far less quirky and idiosyncratic than many pianists of yore. Fiorentino opened his recital with a Ferruccio Busoni arrangement of Bach organ music, the D Major Prelude and Fugue. But rather than turn the piece into a virtuosic showpiece à la Horowitz, Fiorentino opted for an elegant, unhurried reading that was all about building sonorities and bringing a crystalline glint to the meandering melody of the fugue.

_______________________________________________Channing Gray (Providence Journal, July 1996)

For those who thought the Golden Age of pianism was dead, Fiorentino's opening gala recital was a revelation. By some magic, he makes every note of every chord radiate with color and meaning. He exploits every nuance and shading, not only in tone but in rhythm and musical structure. He's the kind of artist whose stamp is very personal and individual but who never batters the music with willful or indulgent exaggeration.

These qualities were most striking in the last sections of the Schumann Fantasy in C. A performance like this is one of those rare events where time stands still, where an entire audience is mesmerized by deliberate, rock-steady melodic chords, taken at a slightly slower pace than usual. And how Fiorentino plays waltzes - his own arrangements of Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss (from Rosenkavalier), arrangements of Johann Strauss by Tausig and Godowsky. The slight ritard after the first beat, the accelerando on beats two and three, bring this form startingly to life.

_______________________________________________Peter Catalano (American Record Guide, 1996)

In person, this small, elegant, dignified man makes the playing seem even more remarkable. Effortlessly and stone-faced, he produces overpowering tone of enormous -- one might even say moral -- authority. His technique is phenomenal. It's hard to escape the term "Golden Age", because few people -- perhaps no one else -- alive today have this particular lost combination of the heroic and the exquisite.

The first half of the program was Fiorentino's arrangement of Busoni's arrangement of Bach's great D-major Organ Prelude and Fugue, in which the simple progress of left hand answering right (four-note phrases, later more surprising seven note phrases) created an increasingly intense and complex sort of tolling (George Herbert's "Church bells beyond the stars heard"), a sound of gathering in, of staking a territory, of calling us all together, and -- most important -- gathering us in.

What followed was the major work of the evening, the Schumann C-major Fantaisie, in a performance that was unforgettable -- uncanny -- in its play between the inward and the outward drama. The first movement began with a quiet weaving of some story (Schumann as Sheherazade), a suspenseful tale of bravery and romance that becomes increasingly personal: Schumann's own story, of course. The quiet resolution is shattered by a heroic and ceremonial march on the grandest scale, which in turn is interrupted by another passage of contemplation and conversation, which leads to greater agitation and a freer play of imagination. Fiorentino ended the movement with a cast-of-thousands finale that roused the audience to applause. But the slowly paced gentle quietude of the last movement seemed even more daring. Fiorentino took his time, spinning out strands of pearls and diamonds in delicate, rippling accompaniment to a plaintive song, almost a lullaby, that evolved into a song of sadness and loss. Reminiscences of great deeds past subsided again into acceptance and finally, with the three last chords, an affirmation of the inner life, a reminder that all we have of value is the song of that inner life.

After an extended intermission, Fiorentino returned with something equally extraordinary -- a breathtaking and dazzling sequence of waltz transcriptions, paraphrases, caprices, and metamorphoses, in which his humming birds trills, stupefying octave runs, and climactic Chico Marx glissandos were actually only the beginning of what he was impressing us with. Like those Golden Age pianists (and I'm especially reminded of Rachmaninov, whose recordings, Fiorentino says, meant more to him as a student than his actual conservatory lessons), he really knows what a waltz is (and knows the operas and operettas they come from), so he can play with one's exspectations with either teasing wit or gentle nostalgia (as in his own "paraphrase" of waltzes from Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier), or (as in Liszt's version of the waltz from Gounod's Faust) with the most radical mood shifts between diabolical ferocity and aching tenderness. In Godowsky's Symphonic Metamorphosen on Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus, Fiorentino gave us a nightmare vision -- half comic -- in which those famous waltz tunes surface as almost ungraspable snippets before they are lost again in a hall of mirrors, or buried in some inebriated, maniacal whirlwind of elusive memory.

Fiorentino's one encore, at 11:22 p.m., was, appropriately, a racing, breathless, bravura rendition of Chopin's Grande Valse Brillante. You could hardly say that in his amazing hands any of this waltzing was less "serious" as musicmaking than the Bach or Schumann.

_____________________________________________Lloyd Schwartz (The Phoenix Media Group, 1996)

That evening, I, along with perhaps a hundred other curious souls, ventured into Alice Tully Hall for the virtually unpublicized appearance of a virtually unknown Italian pianist with the Hollywood-ized name of Sergio Fiorentino and a hard-luck history that nearly outshines Shine ... Mercifully there wasn't a trace of David Helfgott in the man who strode onstage in evening clothes for his first New York recital since 1953, courtesy of the Newport Music Festival and Yamaha Artist Services, on April 6. With his erect figure, snowy white hair and noble profile, Mr. Fiorentino looked like one of Vittorio de Sica's beautifully weathered old Romans who dignify everything they touch, no matter how precarious their circumstances.

With the opening Bach Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major, as transcribed by Ferruccio Busoni, it was clear that here was a pianist deserving of a noun that has become as forgotten as he was: grandeur. It was the grandeur of a Piranesi, not a Tintoretto. In everything that Mr. Fiorentino played - the program went on to include Beethoven's Les Adieux Sonata, Alexander Scriabin's Sonata No. 2 in G Sharp minor and Rachmaninoff's Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor - the musical architecture was presented whole, its true proportions and the relationship of volume to space shaded by the most telling use of pedals I have heard since that other great Neapolitan pianist, Maria Tipo, last came to town.

Mr. Fiorentino's delicate harnessing of the Russians was revelatory; never have I felt the purpose behind Scriabin's fancy shimmerings so keenly, or enjoyed Rachmaninoff's schmaltzy opulence without feeling like gagging. The small, transfixed audience couldn't stop cheering, and the pianist responded by throwing us a bouquet of old-fadshioned encores -- including Chopins Minute Waltz, Mendelssohn's Spinning Song, and the most familiar of Schubert's Moments musicaux -- with the extravagance of a master, rejuvenated.

_________________________________________Charles Michener (The New York Observer, April 1997)

For many, the major Schubert performance thus far was one given by Newport's beloved Sergio Fiorentino. The maestro's Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, Op. Posth. lent extraordinary insight into Schubert's greatest piano score. Fiorentino's elegant and subtle use of rubato let the music flow and sing, as it can do only under the hands of a master.

__________________________________________________Byron Belt (Newport this week, July 1997)

Sergio Fiorentino is a pianist from another age who miraculously materialized in our own ... He began with a Busoni transcription of a Bach Prelude and Fugue in D Major (BWV 532), continued with the Schumann Fantasy, and concluded with a group of five virtuoso waltz transcriptions by Liszt, Tausig, Godowsky, and himself ... I was enthralled at the quality of Fiorentino's tone production and the expressive beauty of his sound, which is full and varied across the entire dynamic spectrum, never loud and harsh, never palid and colorless. There was an extraordinary richness of texture in the performance, and rapturous delight in detail never interfered with the different rapture of foreward motion - chords and echoes of melody floated through the swirl. The march provided another study in obsession, and Fiorentino was completely accurate in the coda, which is something you rarely hear on records, and never in live performance. The last movement brought playing of noble reserve, with the melody shadowed and illumined by the doubling at the octave and by the halo of overtones hovering above the arpeggios.

The keyboard elaborations of waltzes by Gounod, Tchaikovsky, Johann Strauss, and Richard Strauss were, however, what brought back a golden age of romantic pianism - the public glitter and private intimacy of the playing, the ease and insousiance of the virtuosity, the alluring swerves and darts of the rhythm, the interplay of multiple textures and colors in motion, like the pleats of a dancer's dress as she glides. Some glissandi in Liszt's transcription of the "Valse de l'opéra Faust" were like a shimmer of silk; the little odd veneration in the middle, Faust and Marguerite meeting at the Kermesse, was imbued with rare tenderness of feeling. The double notes in Tausig's "Caprice on You only live once" were not only brilliant stunt but an encyclodedia of expressive devices. Godowsky's "Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes from Die Fledermaus" is a masterpiece of contrapuntal ingenuity. Strauss' captivating themes stacked up on each of the circling gracefully, like planes in holding at Chicago's O'Hare. Fiorentino's transcendental performance let you hear each of the themes moving in its own time and its own world as all of them join in a cosmic dance.

The audience rose immediately to its feet, knowing the privilege of what it had just experienced, and Fiorentino obliged with two more waltzes, both by Chopin. The "Minute" Waltz was so exhilarating one wanted it to last forever.

_________________________________________________Richard Dyer (The Boston Globe, April 1998)

... Having heard those initial 1993 recordings (APR 7036, 2CDs) of Bach-Busoni, Beethoven's Op. 110, Chopin's Second Sonata, Scriabin's Fourth, the Schumann Fantasy, and a host of encore lollipops such as the Strauss-Godowsky Fledermaus Symphonic Metamorphosis, I especially anticipated encountering the pianist in person upon his New York return a couple of seasons ago, some forty years after his first New York appearance. Co-sponsered by Yamaha and the Newport Music Festival in Rhode Island, that return was hardly a sellout, his name barely being known, but the audience reception at Manhatten's Alice Tully Hall was simply astonishing. Furthermore, he granted his ecstatic listeners no less than seven encores, something repeated upon his return visit a year or so later and to the same level of audience enthusiasm. The playing was technically as secure as one could wish, but the overriding impression was that of imposing sonority, tonal control, and poise, coupled with a genuinely romantic, unexaggerated interpretive style that seemed to hark back to several generations ago. He reminded me of a much younger Arrau with the ebullience and poetic impulse of a Cortot, the architectural overview of an Edwin Fischer, the tonal gradations of a Bolet, and the nobility of a Lipatti. This was grandeur without flamboyant mannerism.

That initial recital was bypassed by the New York Times, the second one was covered though in a noblesse-oblige tone that seemed unduly patronizing. A planned third visit to New York and elsewhere would have brought even more accolades from those among whom the word had been spreading. But then, just little over a year ago in August 1998, Fiorentino died, presumably from a heart attack.

After each of these two relatively recent New York events both I and my duo-piano partner, Karen Kushner, welcomed the opportunity to meet and chat with Fiorentino over dinner. We found him quite delightful, exceedingly modest, happy to be talking about pianists of the past (he was very fond of Fischer and Cortot), and smoking up a storm. Though clearly tired from his evening efforts, he left the unmistakeable impression that, had there been the opportunity, he might easily have served his enraptured listeners with yet another seven encores.

_________________________________Igor Kipnis (Pianos and Pianists - CD Conspectus, November 1999)

Best performance: Sergio Fiorentino, in March at Lincoln Center. The 70-ish Italian pianist returned to performing after years of obscurity, precipitating widespread religious experiences. His tone quality radiated something indescribably exalted, captured only occasionally by his recordings. Sadly, he died in August.