L’Arena – Il Giornale di Verona
Amici della Musica di Verona – the concert in the new festival.
The young talent is appreciated at the Gran Guardia.
Music for a rebirth, the festival organized by the Amici della Musica to recover at least five of the six subscription concerts lost with the quarantine Covid-19, hosted in Gran Guardia his third appointment with the recital of the nineteen-year-old pianist Elia Cecino, winner of the prestigious Premio Venezia 2019.
The young performer dared a demanding program for keeping, consisting of pieces rarely performed in the first part as the Sonata in two movements Op. 54 in F major by Beethoven and Schubert’s Drei Klavierstücke D 946 and in the second, entirely dedicated to Chopin, the Rondo Op. 16 and the Sonata Op. 35.
The Op. 54, Sonata sui generis, placed in the catalogue between two giants such as Op. 53 Waldstein and Op. 57 Appassionata, she poses not a few interpretative problems being constituted by an initial Tempo di Minuetto, with gallant and neoclassical movements, interspersed with a powerful Trio « always strong and detached » enunciated in octaves and sexes, writing that in itself creates a dynamic and stylistic detachment of considerable proportions. This movement is accompanied by one in fast quatrains of sixteenth, even if it bears the words « Allegretto », which leads to acceleration, an agogical variant that is expressly requested by the author in the final narrow of the last thirty bars.
The three Schubertian Klavierstücke, composed a few months before his death and published posthumously, recall as conception the collections of Impromptus. Already at this stage of the concert Elia Cecino was presented absolutely in order from the technical point of view, and with a rich tonal palette, beautiful cantabile and solid hold. Perhaps, here and there, he will have to resort to some gimmick to give greater variety and imagination to the Schubertian corpus.
The real turning point in the concert of the nineteen year old was, in our opinion, with Chopin, author evidently very congenial to the young pianist: in fact, in the Rondò showed a spectacular salon brilliance and the interpretation of Op. 35 reached really excellent levels in every movement.
Warm applause at the end awarded off-schedule but with the Cajkovskij Nocturne in D minor and the Liszt paraphrase of Gounod’s Walzer Faust performed both with sensitivity, confidence and rare instrumental wisdom. Elia Cecino is a very interesting pianist who soon will certainly talk about himself.
Chiara Zocca
L’Arena
July 19, 2020