More remarkable playing in the Pitti Piano Festival with 17 year old Massimo Urban.
A student of Vincenzo Balzani who already reveals an intellectual curiosity and an extraordinary technical command similar to that many years ago of the genial Andrea Bacchetti.
What he misses in weight he makes up for with a scintillating jeux perlé of remarkable natural ease and a musicality allied to an intelligence and refined sense of colour.
His playing was ideally suited to the rarely played Schumann Allegro op 8. The Mendelssohnian washes of colour were mere moving harmonies brought to life with a rhythmic drive on which floated Schumann’s magical melodic invention.A sense of architectural shape made sense of a piece that has suffered from less intelligent hands.Played with the musical intelligence and refined beauty as in today’s enlightened performance it should be much more often heard in the concert hall.

Chopin’s Héroique Polonaise was brilliantly played but the aristocratic nobility was not yet in our young pianist’s vocabulary.The famous left hand octaves were quite remarkable for their lightness and speed but this is the cavalry and the military march that they accompany was a little lost in this misty atmosphere.The ending was played with remarkable agility and excitement but the nobility and grandeur that Rubinstein gave so inimitably to it will have to wait until his youthful exhilarance and ‘joie de vivre’ turns into something darker and deeper.
The three Rachmaninov Etudes tableaux were remarkable for their washes of chameleon like changes of colour but the sense of line was sometimes forfeited for a remarkable dexterity that was always of ravishing beauty and never just empty note spinning but needed more overall direction.
The most successful was the E flat minor study that Massimo had told us he found the most difficult.
It was exactly for this reason that he gave a truly memorable performance full of passion,sumptuous sounds and real poetic understanding.The final bars in particular,like those of the Liszt B minor sonata,I have rarely heard with such poetic meaning.

His exemplary introduction to the Liszt Sonata was mirrored in a remarkably intelligent performance where Liszt’s precise indications were scrupulously noted.His youthful enthusiasm and extraordinary technical facility led him,though,to take the fugato too fast for the orchestral clarity that Liszt demands and it became a bit of a showcase for the pianist not the composer.
However there were many beautiful things in a remarkable but still youthful performance,not least the final page which is the most extraordinary page in all of Liszt’s vast output.The composer suffered for this page having scratched out his original triumphant ending and substituted it for a visionary page which sums up the entire sonata in so few meaningful notes.
Massimo’s own composition played as a much requested encore just underlined the prodigious and rare talent of this young man still remarkably in his teens.

Shunta Morimoto- Pitti Piano Festival Florence – The inspired recreation of a great artist