Lorenzo Pone

"Playing Bechstein has led to some immediate new performing perspectives of my repertoire."

Lorenzo Pone

“Lorenzo Pone, along with Beatrice Rana, Filippo Gorini and Alexander Gadjiev, is considered as one of the four leading pianists of the new Italian generation, and among them he is undoubtedly the one who has shown the deepest artistic maturity”. This is how in 2019 Louis Delvincourt, a colleague of Le Monde, reviewed a concert in Salzburg by the young artist whom Paul Badura-Skoda had publicly presented as his “[...] artistic heir and spiritual son” back in 2014, during Wiener Musikverein matinée.

Lorenzo Pone is Italian by birth but lives and works between Berlin and Salzburg, where he completed his studies at the Universität Mozarteum. Particularly appreciated for an extremely special sound quality, his finely expressive style has consistently been compared to that of Dinu Lipatti and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli - Corriere della Sera, 2019. By the beginning of 2018, Pone was awarded the London Gateway’s Award after King Charles III of England granted him a scholarship for a year’s further training at the Royal College of Music. Back in 2013, his victory in the Portuguese Radio International Competition had prompted the young artist to make a series of exquisite radio recordings at the RTP studios in Lisbon, recordings that were soon picked up by BBC, ORF, RAI, Radio France and broadcast across Europe, soon to be followed by two long solo tours in the United States and South America.

“To this day, no pianist can give his generation such an unforgettable Mozart”, commented in 2016 Harry Saltzman of The New York Times.

Since his top placement in the 2011 Rome International Piano Competition, Lorenzo has been concentrating on solo career under the guidance and with the full support of Paul Badura-Skoda: invitations to the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, Wigmore Hall, Wiener Konzerthaus, Bruxelles, Lille, Barcelona, an extensive tour across Brazil, Boston, New York, Shanghai, Sidney, Milan and Salzburg, to name only a few, were not long in coming. Exactly in 2011 Pone had met Paul Badura-Skoda in Vienna, during a rigorous selection process aimed at choosing eight participants for the Wiener Meister-Kurse to be held at Schloss Laudon, the former summer hunting lodge of the Austrian emperors just outside the city. This has marked the beginning of an eight-year relationship between master and student characterised by density, continuity and an impressive mutual identification. Lorenzo has recalled his beginnings in a long interview released in 2019, expressing gratitude to his Italian instructor Francesco Mariani - himself a direct pupil of Alexis Weissenberg and Tatiana Nikolaeva - whose teaching was crucial to the outcomes at the first meeting with Badura-Skoda. On 6th October 2019 in Naples, the day the legendary artist would have turned 92, Lorenzo dedicated a triumphant recital to Paul Badura-Skoda at the legendary Teatro di San Carlo. A recent concert- interview released in 2022 to the Italian Radio-Television, has pointed out the intersection of both teaching and inspiring figures within Lorenzo Pone’s identity as an original interpreter.

After the 2020 pandemic, Lorenzo Pone has carried on a thriving career with a new series of radio recordings for RTP in 2021 and most recently at the end of 2022, and the release of Neapolitan Violin Sonatas: a 20th century chamber music album on the Mozarteum label that has promptly been RAI-broadcast while receiving the Award of the Italian Press. Concert activity in 2023, ’24 and ’25 will take Lorenzo Pone on an extensive tour of Spain, again to Switzerland with a series of concerts in Lausanne, Zürich, Basel and Geneva, a chamber music project across Europe with the wind players of the Karajan-Akademie of the Berliner Philharmoniker, a Northern Europe tour in the Baltic countries, a new radio recital in Lisbon, a tour of Italy in Genoa, Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Sacile, a new RAI chamber music broadcast in June 2023 together with Lorenzo Dainelli - clarinet at the Karajan-Akademie - and a new series of masterclasses and solo recitals in China and South Korea.

Text by Pierre Lukas, translated by Elisabeth Vilatte