This self-portrait Andrea Bacchetti has been drawing through the sequence of three CDs make us think about the processing of a film; each CD, overlapping the previous one, lets a better and better defined image emerge, just like it happens when in a darkroom we observe astonished the film dipped in the chemical solution and we see it liven up and reveal the trait of the face with surer discerning. Like it precisely happens with this third CD that adds to Bacchetti’s artistic physiognomy some more firm features, that make clearer  the profile outlined by the previous passages. If compared with such passages – which wander along the most distended Romantic horizon - the image now appears as if it was braced by two “strong” reagents, very far from each other, Mozart and Berio.

That is to say  - now the portrait is getting more complete – classicality and modernity, two terms that can remain totally generic if we don’t dig deep into them to look for a more secret and essential sense, that refers to more specific expressive contents; which makes classicality be an even riskier parameter if it is referred to Mozart, as it has happened also recently to me to verify, on occasion of an international context that included as an obliged passage the execution of a Mozart’s Sonata, a touchstone with which all the young contestants had to “clash” – in effect – even if they had an often amazing  piano outfit. Well, no one among those Mozart performances, almost all impeccable from a digital point of view, succeeded in transmitting an authentic lively sense, because in fact playing Mozart means in a certain sense filling with life – with all those situations it implies and brings about and that the composer records in a both natural and amazing way, on keyboard and on stage, in a circularity that has no comparisons – that so clear form, to incorporate it in the very flowing of the speech. Here is the player’s great problem in front of Mozart’s page!

Bacchetti seems to be very aware of this fact and we can see it from the beat he impresses on his way, neither stiff or submitted, on the contrary here and there with a bit of boldness that shines from some gestures of his pronunciation and that precisely seems to mean a way to feel comfortable.

In such a naturalness we can recognize the suggestion - that in any case he never hid – he received from Miecio Horzowsky’s witness, who could listen to the very young Andrea just during A Mozart performance and to express his approval, a demonstration of great account knowing what strictness that behind the apparent meekness of his look, just passed through by something indistinguishable, led the old Master. And just thanks to the way Bacchetti shapes his own speech, thinking of a balance that is never cold architecture, but it is opposition of emotional situations that are embodied in the enigmatic fibres of musical language – and we can hear it also from that underlying with his voice that emerges here and there in filigree some more intense articulations – it seems we can hear again that lovable Great Old Man’s words when he said “Piano is not a typewriter”. Keys never give the same sound because there are no two identical notes. 

The composer indicates the lasting, puts some signs: a “forcella” (fork), a “pianissimo”, an arpeggio, but how intense are they? This is decided by the player, this is the “freedom”. Also Luciano Berio must have seen Andrea Bacchetti’s both peculiar and precocious musical intelligence if, after listening to him when he was 12 in Saltsburg, in 1989, he invited him to study on his own piano production: that it is not abundant, I would say almost secondary if compared to the big bulk of other compositions (even if now there is also a very consistent Sonata) and yet always significant and anything but “easy” because of the originality of sound choice it triggers off. So we can image talented kid’s probable confusion in front of a writing that seemed to offer few references to tradition and that then implied a totally different way to behave. Well, the fact that Bacchetti wanted to indicate these Berio’s Six Encores as a significant trait of his self-portrait seems important to me and we can well feel it in the unequivocal mark each of these pages gets by his execution, in the way the different musical project lying under each of them becomes an imaginative gesture. On the other hand I don’t feel Bacchetti would have chosen such an entry into modernity if he had not found a tally in the composer himself, who in fact after the first listening, which occurred in Florence in 1996, showed to be decisively critic – in Bacchetti’s opinion – because he believed the reading the young pianist had proposed made longer that vision settled by great ‘800 tradition to which these little slivers were clearly strangers; just because of that technical challenge the Ligurian composer always subtends to his creative imagination, almost like “frescobaldiani” obligations, self-orders that create sound very provoking objects, each of them with a tangible substantiality, that the player must adopt, in a total sense, in order to make such objects become revealing, praising in a certain sense the matter itself.  And I must confess that for the first time I could seize, thanks to the communication strength of Bacchetti’s proposal, the sense spurting from these fleeting Encores, that I had never considered very much, - in the mobility if the spectrum they are building - and that, in fact, the young pianist defines one by one with an infallible quickness, with a measured sweetness, as if it was numb with cold of Wasserklavier where Berio seems to evoke again the square “Ravelismo”  of the young Petit Suite – that effectively signed Bacchetti’s Berio  initiation – to the slight sound plays reflected by Erdenklavier, where the whispering ghosts of mysterious “Aeolian  harps”(and such ghosts had already been evoked by Berio in the Sequence with a deliberate return to Chopin Study) assume uncontrollable dilatations, like also in the restless and really scorching Fuerklavier, written for the Saturnine Peter Serkin, where the pianistic play gets brave, I would say “sensational” as far as Liszt is concerned.

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