Concerts, talks, and concert-lectures
A personal project by Luca Chiantore
Musicological research can prove an unparalleled stimulus for bringing ideas to performance. But I have long been aware that performance can just as easily feed back to musicological thinking. And this is not all. Very often these synergies reveal no clear unidirectional trajectory. I experience this fertile collision with growing interest, in particular because of its potential to reshape our historiographic, stylistic, and professional categories. With this in mind, in November, 2018, I launched this new personal project: concerts, talks, recordings, and other initiatives, some addressed to an academic environment, others to general audiences, the common thread being my yearning to offer alternative ways to perform the classical-music repertoire from a starting point of unconventional musicology-based approaches.
Luca Chiantore
A piano recital combining music and spoken word. Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata is presented with added movements, improvised fermatas and interludes, recomposed cadenzas, and original melodic material drawn from the Landsberg 6 manuscript. All this, preceded by nine striking studies by his contemporary Hélène de Nervo de Montgeroult—perhaps the most unexpected discovery of early twenty-first-century musicology.
2025–2027
My inVersions of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Granados’s Valses Poéticos, the captivating Fantasy in F Major by Szymanowska, and a semi-improvised completion of Mozart’s unfinished Fantasy in D minor. All performed in a seamless blend of music and spoken text, reshaping the concert experience into an electrifying exploration of emotions rooted in personal and collective memory.
2025–2027
A groundbreaking reinterpretation of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, transformed into a reflection on the challenges of the contemporary world, together with an unexpected version of Chopin’s Prelude, Op. 45, and Fanny Hensel’s forward-looking cycle of “songs for piano,” Op. 6, presented in a moving recital in which music and spoken language constantly merge.
2026–2028
A mesmerizing evening focused on memory and the senses, exploring the complex personal and artistic relationship between Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms through a careful selection of their works, alongside a personal reworking of the variations written by both figures on the same theme by Robert Schumann. Unforeseen sonorities and heightened emotions.
2026–2028
Spoken presentation woven into a continuous piano improvisation—an unprecedented format I have presented in the USA, Mexico, Chile, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, and Latvia to date.
Imagine Clara Schumann on her deathbed, looking back and rediscovering the works she composed sixty years earlier—a moving experience shaped through words and sound.
2026–2027
A joint presentation with Angela López-Lara devoted to our groundbreaking research on these events and the resulting discovery of this legendary instrument, outlining its features and its significance in the context of the 1889 Paris World’s Fair.
2024–2027
Performative lecture for all audiences exploring Beethoven the pianist and improviser—the artist who, through his relationship with the keyboard, forged a way of relating to music profoundly different from the image shaped by posterity.
2026–2027
Ninety minutes unfolding piano technique through its leading figures and its transformations over time, amid constructive, aesthetic, and social changes—a story of bodies, sounds, and culture in motion.
2024–2027
…or four different ways of not playing “what is written in the score”. Piano recital with spoken commentaries.
2018–2020
Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata with added movements, improvised fermatas and interludes, recomposed cadenzas, and original melodic material drawn from the Landsberg 6 manuscript, alongside Szymanowska’s surprising Fantasy in F-major and a series of startling etudes by Hélène de Nervo de Montgeroult—the extraordinary woman who embodied, better than anyone, that turbulent age of revolutions. A piano recital with spoken commentaries.
2020–2023
A lecture at the piano, featuring works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johannes Brahms, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
2018–2020
A lecture with musical examples from works by Hélène de Montgeroult, Fryderyk Chopin, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johannes Brahms.
2019–2021
Concert-lecture. Works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Muzio Clementi, and Ludwig van Beethoven.
2020–2022
The thrilling life and extraordinary music of a singular figure in music history, featuring works by Hélène de Montgeroult.
2021–2023
A radically different performance of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto: an inVersion with variants and thoroughbass according to the first edition; fermatas, cadenza, interludes, and solos (re)composed from autograph sketches; ornamented timpani and added snare drum parts; and two original melologues, partially derived from the incidental music for Egmont.
Private world premiere: Mexico City, December 2, 2021
Public world premiere: Morelia, Mexico, December 4, 2021.
Tzintzuni Chamber Orchestra, conductor: Juan Vázquez.
Also performed in Bolivia (La Paz, August 2024) and Cuba (Havana, June 2025)
A 300-page book, scheduled for publication in December 2026.
Piano recitals, chamber concerts, and multi-layered recordings featuring works by Johannes Brahms and Clara Wieck-Schumann.
2025–2027
A surprising album that moves on the threshold between music and silence. An hour halfway between composition and improvisation, where classical works become memories, longings, and absences that linger in the mind. Recording scheduled for spring 2026; release scheduled for September 2026. Produced by Ronald Ayala at El Spot Studios.
An experimental recording of my inVersions of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Granados’ Valses Poéticos, and Szymanowska’s Fantasy in F Major, enhanced by two engaging bonus tracks. Recording scheduled for summer 2026; release scheduled for December 2026. Sound engineer: Ronald Ayala. Produced by Luca Chiantore and Ronald Ayala at El Spot Studios.
