The sixteenth edition of the 'Benemerenza al merito under the title of San Ranieri' that will take place on Thursday 16 June (Church of the Knights, 5.30 p.m.) was presented this morning. This year it will be awarded to maestro Maurizio Baglini for "having brought lustre and honour to the name of the city of Pisa in the world". The 'Benemerenza', which was established in 2005 by the Accademia dei Disuniti, is awarded to deserving people who have distinguished themselves for their skills and also for their attachment to the city; among the recipients are Andrea Bocelli, Gillo Pontecorvo, Salvatore Settis, and Adalberto Gianzotto. The last edition, in 2019, was awarded to the Opera Primaziale Pisana.
The appointment with the award ceremony is therefore for Thursday 16 June (Church of the Knights, 5.30 p.m.), where civil and military authorities, representatives of the Accademia dei Disuniti, and engineer Mario Pellegrini Filippeschi, president of the 'Titta Ruffo - amici della lirica' association, will be present. This will be followed by a concert by maestro Maurizio Baglini with music by Bach, Mozart and Chopin.
Who is Maurizio Baglini - A visionary pianist with a taste for musical challenges, Maurizio Baglini has an intense international concert career. Winner at the age of 24 of the "World Music Piano Master" in Monte Carlo, he regularly performs at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Salle Gaveau in Paris, the Kennedy Center in Washington and is a guest at prestigious festivals, including La Roque d'Anthéron, Yokohama Piano Festival, Australian Chamber Music Festival, "Festival Pianistico Internazionale di Bergamo e Brescia. He has performed as soloist with important ensembles including the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monaco, the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and with conductors such as Luciano Acocella, Francesco Angelico, Marco Angius, John Axelrod, Antonello Allemandi, Umberto Benedetti Michelangeli, Giampaolo Bisanti, Filippo Maria Bressan, Marcello Bufalini, Massimiliano Caldi, Tito Ceccherini, Daniel Cohen, Howard Griffiths, Armin Jordan, Seikyo Kim, Emanuel Krivine, Antonello Manacorda, Karl Martin, Donato Renzetti, Corrado Rovaris, Ola Rudner, Daniele Rustioni and Maximiano Valdes, Tobias Woegerer. He is the dedicatee soloist of "Tre Quadri", Piano Concerto by Francesco Filidei, which he premiered with the OSN Rai conducted by Tito Ceccherini in streaming on Rai Cultura, Rai Radio 3, EuroRadio and broadcast on Rai5 in November 2020. In September 2021, "Tre Quadri" was performed by Baglini and Ceccherini, again with the OSN Rai, in a world premiere with an audience, at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, for the Milano Musica Festival.
In 2022, he played as soloist at the Ravenna Festival, under the baton of Daniel Harding, with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, in a programme featuring Azio Corghi's piece 'Tra la carne e il cielo'. The piece was commissioned to the composer by Baglini himself, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini's death and is dedicated to the cellist Silvia Chiesa. Maurizio Baglini's record production for Decca/Universal, always greeted by excellent reviews, includes keyboard music by Liszt, Brahms, Schubert, Domenico Scarlatti and Mussorgsky and the series Live at Amiata Piano Festival. Baglini is also conducting the complete Schumann piano works and the first five CDs available so far are already considered an interpretative benchmark. He is among the few virtuosi in the world to perform Beethoven's 'Ninth Symphony' in Liszt's transcendental piano transcription. Since 2008, he has been invited to perform this dizzying masterpiece live on many prestigious stages - in cities including Rome, Milan, Cremona, Paris, Munich, Tel Aviv, Beirut, Rio de Janeiro - and in 2020 he exceeded the record number of one hundred performances. He initiated the innovative 'Web Piano' project in which his live interpretations - from Schumann's Carnaval to Mussorgsky's Pictures of an Exhibition or Debussy's Images - are accompanied by video projections by the artist Giuseppe Andrea L'Abbate (La Roque d'Anthéron, Lisztomanias, Châteauroux, Emilia Romagna Festival).
Also passionate about the chamber music repertoire, he has shared the stage with Kristóf Baráti, Enrico Bronzi, Gautier Capuçon, Renaud Capuçon, Cinzia Forte, Corrado Giuffredi, Andrea Griminelli, Gabriele Pieranunzi, Roberto Prosseda, Massimo Quarta, the Quartetto della Scala and other distinguished colleagues. Since 2006 he has formed a stable duo with cellist Silvia Chiesa, with whom he has more than 250 concerts worldwide to his credit.
He is the artistic director of the Amiata Piano Festival, the international music festival he founded in 2005 and which has been held at the Forum Bertarelli in Poggi del Sasso (Grosseto, Tuscany) since 2015. Since 2013, he has been the artistic consultant for music and dance of the Teatro Comunale 'Verdi' in Pordenone, which in recent years has realised exclusive concerts for Italy, created a publishing series in collaboration with Ets and become the main partner of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester in its European tours. In 2019, he was appointed Honorary Member of Aiarp, the Italian Association of Piano Tuners and Repairers "for the high merits and important artistic contributions that his activity has brought to the cause of the piano". He plays a Fazioli grandcoda.
