Christina McEwan
THANK heavens for the internet, for catching up with pianist Antonio Pompa-Baldi proved a real challenge as he moved around China and America before gearing up for this concert with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra – an all Brahms gala fundraiser presented by the Friends of Orchestral Music on Thursday at The City Hall at 8pm.
Pompa-Baldi is fitting this engagement in between concerts in America and a return visit to China.
A sample of his itinerary makes one’s head buzz.
On November 12 he played in Columbus, Ohio, giving a masterclass there the following day; then he flew to Florida to play the Brahms Second Piano Concert and headed to Cape Town on November 17 to play the same concerto with the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra.
The very next day he went back to China, to Xiamen for the China International Piano Competition festival, where he gave a recital and masterclasses, before going on to an island called Gulangyu, for an Italian Music Week, which he organized with Italian musicians.
His wife Emanuela Friscioni, also a pianist with an established career in America, played with him in two of his five concerts, while daughter Eleanor, aged 10, was in the audience – an unusual family occasion!
Pompa-Baldi, who was born in Italy, went to America for the first time in 1999 to play in the Cleveland International Piano Competition, took 1st prize, and never left, well in a manner of speaking. He is now Distinguished Professor of Piano at the Cleveland Institute of Music and a clearly very successful one, since some of his students have gone on to win other big competitions such as the Marguerite Long and Gina Bachauer.
Although neither he nor Emanuela spoke any English at the time, they were embraced by a Canadian residing in Cleveland, Mark Curley, who opened home and heart to them and helped them to get settled. Mark spoke French, in which Antonio and Emanuela are fluent, so there was no language barrier with Mark. They were quick studies, and both settled easily into the American way of life.
The year before, Antonio had been a top prizewinner in the 1998 Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition in Paris, and later he also won a silver medal at the 2001 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
Once settled in America, he never looked back, appearing constantly all over the world in recitals, festivals and with some of the world’s great orchestras.
Amongst his highlights are playing in the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, and of course, he says, his appearances in Cape Town.
He first came to the attention of the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra in 2012 when, following his South African recital debut during the Piano Symposium at the University of Stellenbosch, he returned a few months later to tour the Country. Among his engagements, he played the Third Piano Concerto of Rachmaninov with CPO.
That performance led to an invitation to return and complete the Rachmaninoff cycle. Thus, he has played all the Rachmaninov Piano Concertos in Cape Town to adulatory audiences.
His recordings include an all-Brahms disc ( Azica), and a live and unedited recital from his award-winning Cliburn Competition performances ( Harmonia Mundi) along with the Josef Rheinberger Piano Sonatas; the entire piano catalogue of Edward Grieg, in 12 volumes; an all-Rachmaninov CD; an all-Schumann album; and the first two volumes of the complete Hummel Piano Sonatas.
He also recorded a CD titled After a reading of...Liszt! for the South African label TwoPianists. In 2013, he issued The Rascal and the Sparrow-Poulenc meets Piaf for the Steinway label, featuring songs by Francis Poulenc and Edith Piaf, arranged for solo piano, to mark the passing 50 years prior of both French musical icons.
Antonio Pompa-Baldi is a Steinway Artist and a juror of note, often invited to preside over or join the panel of many big competitions such as the San Jose International Piano Competition in California, the Hilton Head Piano Competition, and the Grieg Competition in Bergen, Norway.
He will be a juror next year on the same Cleveland Competition that changed his life!
So how did Cape Town get so lucky to have this pyrotechnical genius come back?
It took place over a dinner table in Halifax in Canada where Bernhard Gueller, conductor of the FOM gala, had invited him to play two Rachmaninov concerti in a festival with Symphony Nova Scotia earlier this year.
Gueller ascertained his availability and passed this on Friends’ Chairman Derek Auret, who wasted no time and within days all was signed and sealed.
l Tickets for the concert which also includes the Brahms Symphony no 3 are R500. Book: Computicket 0861 915 8000, www.computicket.com or Artscape Dial-a-Seat 021 421 7695. Members receive a discount and an invitation to the post-concert party to meet the artists. Join the friends prior to the concert on www.fomct.com