Rising piano star Filippo Gorini digs ever deeper into Bach's Art of the Fugue
After seeing the young Italian play with VRS, you may never hear the composer the same way again
The Vancouver Recital Society presents Filippo Gorini in The Art of Fugue Explored at the Playhouse on Sunday, September 18. The pre-concert talk starts at 2 p.m., and the music at 3.
DON’T DAWDLE. And by that we mean more than just “Get your tickets now, before Filippo Gorini’s Sunday-afternoon concert sells out,” although that’s an advisable plan.
What you really need to know, however, is that you’re going to want to be in place before the Italian pianist’s 2 pm pre-concert talk, for this young virtuoso is attempting nothing less than a wholesale reinvention of some of the western world’s most significant music.
His explanation of the project will be almost as enlightening as his playing, and you may never hear Johann Sebastian Bach the same way again.
On the program is Bach’s complete The Art of the Fugue, a collection of 18 brief exercises in counterpoint that somehow add up to a challenging, monumental, and infinitely influential survey of the many ways in which the 12 tones of the octave can be morphed, bent, and otherwise reconfigured to express an immense range of structural and emotional possibilities. It’s a work that Gorini has been increasingly obsessed with since his student days—and although those days were not so long ago, he’s already mastered a score that other, equally gifted pianists might take a lifetime to comprehend.
“In Italy, we are forced to study harpsichord for two years when we study piano,” Gorini explains in near-flawless English, reached by phone at Vancouver Recital Society artistic director Leila Getz’s Vancouver home. “And I was very lucky to have as a teacher Sergio Vartolo, who is a noted scholar of The Art of Fugue. Amongst the works that he made me learn on the harpsichord there were two counterpoints, the first and the fourth, from The Art of Fugue. I had always known about the work from a distance, but it was always something that was mentioned as sort of an intellectual curiosity, a monument that was more meant to be studied as some kind of theoretical undertaking than as practical, enjoyable, expressive music. And my realization, when I was playing it on the harpsichord, was that this music was of course intellectual, was of course theoretically perfect and mind-blowing, but the sheer intensity of the expression that was in these notes was like nothing I had ever encountered. And, really, the feeling was that this was the point of the music, and not so much its construction, which was just the tool for it to reach the paper.
“So during the next years I kept reading one counterpoint here and one counterpoint there, slowly making my way through the work,” Gorini continues. “And I always felt like at some point I would need some concentrated time just to devote to The Art of Fugue, to properly finish studying it, learning it more in depth with the right kind of concentration. And when the pandemic arrived, somehow it clicked that this was going to be the time for me to… not finish, but get to a firm standpoint in what had been a long-running musical project.”
By the time the pianist emerged from his pandemic layoff, he’d accomplished that, and much, much more. As it stands now, Gorini’s The Art of Fugue Explored encompasses concerts, pre-concert talks, a rapturously well-received double-CD recording of the score, and a series of surprisingly accomplished sonnets and haiku that illustrate his emotional response to Bach’s music. Still to come are 14 videotaped interviews with other Bach-loving artists—ranging from musicians Alfred Brendel, Mitsuko Uchida, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin to architect Frank Gehry and dancer-choreographer Sasha Waltz—and a feature film.
“I wanted to hear from people in all different sorts of cultural fields what they felt, and why they were so attracted to Bach,” Gorini explains. “And what I met with, so far, is that they all come to it from different points of view, whether it is [theatre and opera director] Peter Sellars with his love for humanity and for the healing power that Bach can have, or whether it’s Frank Gehry, who told me that, when designing architecture, he only ever listens to Bach’s music, because that’s the one composer that really thinks like an architect, using geometry but then transcending it to build something that seems to breathe, to have a living soul.”
In his youth, his virtuosity, his intellectual curiosity, his articulate passion, and his use of different media to amplify the musical experience, Gorini is inevitably going to remind many of Glenn Gould, the last pianist who, with his 1956 recording of The Goldberg Variations, permanently altered the public’s understanding of Bach. And this is all the more remarkable in that Gorini sounds nothing like the famously reclusive Canadian.
“I do love Glenn Gould: his ability to understand music, to make music speak, and to find ways of communicating music that is incredibly complex to the masses,” Gorini notes. “In many ways I think I am influenced by him in my approach—although his sound choice, basically, is in a way the opposite of mine. It’s a very sharp attack, which penetrates immediately. Every note is felt instantly, wheres I prefer an extremely round attack, almost imagining a singing voice.
“When I look at the score of The Art of Fugue, with its pure intervals and its clear voice leading, I imagine the soundworld of Renaissance madrigals,” he adds. “I really imagine this as being sung by a quartet of human voices in a very pure, Renaissance way. For me, Renaissance madrigals are one of the most beautiful forms of expression in music ever invented. So that’s how I try to play it at the piano, with that kind of expressive world in my mind.”
That Bach’s music is able to successfully sustain such radically different interpretations is proof of the German master’s genius. And that the 26-year-old Gorini has arrived at such a personal style at such a young age is surely proof of his.
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