July 4, 2011.

The Italian pianist Igor Cognolato was born in Treviso, Italy, in 1965. He started his musical training at the age of five. At nineteen he received a diploma, magna cum laude, in piano performance from the Benedetto Marcello Academy in Venice, where he studied under the late Vincenzo Pertile, himself a student of the great Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. He pursued his musical education at the Academy of Music in Hanover, Germany, with the Brazilian pianist Roberto Szidon. In his debut concert, which was broadcast live, he played Liszt's Second Piano concerto with NDR Symphony Orchestra. Igor continued his studies in composition and piano with Aldo Ciccolini, Paul Badura-Skoda, the composer Ugo Amendola, and others.

Igor Cognolato has successfully performed throughout the Western Europe and the US. As a soloist with a number of orchestras (Radiophilharmonie Hanover, Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, Bourgas Philharmonic, Orchestra del Gran Teatro La Fenice di Venezia among them), he recorded for RAI, NDR Radio, and for Norwegian National Radio. Since 2009 he has been performing with Athenaeum String Quartet, which consists of the members of the Berlin Philharmonic. Recently they took part in the Aix-en-Provence chamber music festival and their performance was broadcast live on ARTE TV channel.

Presently, Igor Cognolato teaches piano performance at the Academy of music “Giuseppe Tartini" in Trieste, Italy. He also gives master classes at the Musikhochschule in Graz, and in Vienna, in Lübeck, Germany, and in London (the Trinity college of music).

We’re fortunate to have a large selection of Igor Cognolato’s recordings, both as a soloist and a chamber musician. Igor’s repertoire is broad and includes a number of pieces by modern Italian composers. We’ll hear him play the following: Noctuelles and Oiseaux tristes from Miroirs, by Maurice Ravel; Arioso, from the rarely performed Sinfonia, Arioso e Toccata op.59, by the Italian composer Alfredo Casella; Blues, the second movement of Maurice Ravel’s Sonata for violin and piano (with the violinist Ara Malikian). Finally, we’ll hear Liszt’s Scherzo and March, S.177. To listen, click here.

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