Antonio Morabito playing Chopin for Alberto Portugheis’s Opus Musica . Antonio is not only a graduate from the Conservatory of Reggio Calabria but also holds a Masters from the Royal College in London.
A degree in philosophy too, but his real passion is music which held his audience spellbound on this freezing winters day.
Some of Chopin’s best loved works including the first Ballade, played with aristocratic good taste, where technical hurdles became an integral part of the overall structure that Antonio played with remarkable control and beauty of sound. The second Scherzo was played with fearless abandon where poetry and brilliance could live together combining to lead to the coda that he played with fearless mastery and exhilaration . The concert concluded with the magical Andante Spianato, played with heartrending simplicity , leading to the Grande Polonaise Brillante of extraordinary jeu perlé brilliance and which brought this very enjoyable recital to an exhilarating end.
Having played two Chopin Nocturnes and two waltzes with a great sense of style. The ecstatic outpouring of op 27 n. 2 played with passionate intensity and whispered beauty. The Nocturne op 62 n 1 is one of Chopin’s last works and is full of intricate counterpoints of poignant significance which Antonio played with a radiance and beauty of subtle understanding. The ‘minute’ waltz op 64 n 1 was played with streams of sound that rose and fell as the melodic outpouring of the central episode was allowed to float on a wave of charm and grace. He gave a great architectural shape to the waltz op 64 n. 2 that was one of Rubinstein’s favourite encores and which Antonio played with delicacy and stylistic beauty. He dedicated his encore to a journalist from La Repubblica newspaper, playing one of Chopin’s Mazurkas that Schumann had described as ‘canons covered in flowers ‘ .
Opus Musica is a concert series devised by Alberto Portugheis who could not be present today because he had been invited to address a meeting of the Peace Conference in Bangkok . This Renaissance man now in his 86th year is not only a colleague and childhood friend of Martha Argerich but an untiring campaigner for Peace having been nominated twice for a Nobel. A lifetime dedicated to trying to cover the lucrative canons of governments, with flowers to create peace rather than conflict in a turbulent world kept at unrest by an inexplicable arms race
