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LISZT and CAMPANELLA
Young Michele from Naples met Franz Liszt at the tender age of 14. The encounter was some sort of revelation: it was as if the great Hungarian’s sounds contained the music Michele had been composing and would continue to compose, but amplified a thousand times. Immediately after “Funérailles”, Michele went on to play “Mephisto-Valzer”, which won him a national award at the age of 16 and the International Alfredo Casella Prize at 19. In 1968, he made his debut with the Accademia di Santa Cecilia Orchestra from Rome and the state television Rai Orchestra from Milan, by playing Totentanz conducted by Eliahu Inbal and Christoph von Dohnanyi. In 1970, he signed a contract with Philips to record Totentanz, Hungarian Fantasy, a disc containing paraphrases and to record the 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies. Four of these recordings, now available on CD, are still sold all over the world today.
Other recordings followed for PYE England, Acanta and Nuova Era with a vast repertoire including the two Liszt’s concertos with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Hubert Soudant, all Wagner’s transcriptions and the 12 Transcendental Studies.
In the 70s and 80s, Campanella did considerable work on Liszt’s paraphrases, anticipating and promoting the success that this type of music enjoys today. There are 41 of those in his repertoire. In 1986, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Liszt’s death, Campanella performed extensively in recitals and with orchestras, and completed a series of Lisztian recordings for Rai Uno at the Hungarian Academy in Rome. He was entrusted with the documentary “Viaggio in Italia” (Travelling through Italy), again for Rai Uno, in which he played the piano and told stories of Liszt in Italy. In the same year, the Ministry for Hungarian Culture awarded Campanella a medal for his Lisztian work. Another medal came from the American Liszt Society in 2002, in the form of a career award for his work on Liszt. The Liszt Society of Budapest awarded him the Gran Prix du Disque three times (1977, 1978 and 1998) for his recordings. His most recent award came in 2008 during the Grottammare Festival, the town in the Marche region of Italy where Liszt stayed on holiday.
One of the most interesting parts of Campanella’s repertoire is Liszt’s “Via Crucis”, one of the late masterpieces of Liszt. Campanella performs it often, and he recorded it on CD with the Choir of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, conducted by Campanella as he played the pianoforte. He also played two Lisztian melodramas with the great italian actor Glauco Mauri, Lenore e Der traurige Mönch, at the Scala Opera House in Milan.
Campanella’s most recent musical feat was the performance of four Lisztian masterpieces for piano and orchestra in just one evening, under his direction. This had never been attempted before and is the result of his longstanding experience gathered during his 40 years on stage. Merging the roles of conductor and the soloist was not a mere exhibition of his skills, but rather an answer to the need for a complete unity of the musical intention.
Campanella has various projects lined up for 2011:
Four recitals featuring the greatest original masterpieces from the Lisztian repertoire: a synthesis of the work produced during his long career.
As President of the newly-formed “Società Liszt”, Italian Chapter of the American Liszt Society, Campanella will be able to collaborate with the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and publicly present in the Parco della Musica in Rome, for the first time in the world, the complete music for piano by Liszt (excluding the arrangements of original work written for other instruments, and alternative versions). In order to play 55 hours of music, 7 Sunday marathons will be organised between 2010 and 2011, in which 60 Italian pianists will take part. The Italian Music Conservatories will be involved in the event, hoping that the young and very young music students will use this opportunity to discover many unknown repertoires of the Hungarian musician.
Michele Campanella has 137 Lisztian pieces in his repertoire and can list at least 2904 public performances of these pieces… to date.
April 2009