Italian pianist Giuseppe Scotese to perform music of Bach and Busoni May 1

Renowned Italian pianist Giuseppe Scotese will present a piano recital featuring the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) at 8 p.m. Monday, May 1, in Graham Chapel.

The concert is free and open to the public and is sponsored by the Department of Music in Arts & Sciences. Graham Chapel is located immediately north of the Mallinckrodt Student Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd. For more information, call (314) 935-4841 or staylor@wustl.edu.

Scotese primarily focuses on the music of the 18th and 20th centuries and frequently juxtaposes them in concert. The May 1 recital will feature a program of parallel works by Bach and Busoni, the latter of whom is probably best known for his grand transcriptions of Bach’s organ music for the modern piano. (Vladimir Horowitz and other great 20th-century pianists regularly included Busoni’s transcriptions in their concert repertoire.)

The program will begin with Bach’s setting of the chorale ‘Ehre sei Gott in der Hohe, followed by Busoni’s “Elegy No. 3: Chorale Prelude on Bach’s Chorale Meine Seele bangt und hofft zu dir.” Scotese will then perform “Contrapunctus No. 19” from Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, a compilation of imitative compositions. Concluding the recital is Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, which contains Busoni’s variations on Bach’s ‘Ehre sei Gott in der Hohe.

In addition to his career as a concert artist, Scotese is on the faculty of Rome’s Santa Cecilia Music Conservatory and is director of the Officina Musicale dell’ Altipiano delle Rocche, a festival held in Rocca di Mezzo, Italy. He has recorded the piano sonatas of Giovanni Benedetto Piatti as well as the several discs of contemporary music. His own composition Three Studies for Piano was published by Ricordi, Italy’s leading music publisher.

Scotese has given master classes and recitals at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Manhattan School of Music, New England Conservatory of Music and Musashino University in Tokyo, where he was in residence. He also served as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College.