Paraphrases de Salon – 19th Century Opera Transcriptions

Pianist, conductor and composer, RUBEN MICIELI, has won over 40 international competitions, including Second Prize at the 9th International Franz Liszt Piano Competition Weimar-Bayreuth, and was a semi-finalist and received the Best Italian Award at the 66th Maria Canals International Music Competition. He has performed in prestigious venues across Europe and Asia, such as Teatro La Fenice, Weimarhalle, Palau de la Música Catalana, Salle Cortot and Auditorio ‘Víctor Villegas’, collaborating with renowned orchestras including the Staatskapelle Weimar and Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini. Micieli graduated with honours from the Conservatorio Bellini in Catania and the Academia Internacional de Música ‘Aquiles Delle Vigne’, studying with Giovanni Cultrera and Aquiles Delle Vigne, and has honed his craft with Michel Béroff, Piotr Paleczny, Roberto Prosseda, Boris Berman, Till Fellner, Jörg Demus, Andrzej Jasiński, Sergio Perticaroli, Leslie Howard, Yejin Gil and Carmelo Pappalardo.

Stefano Golinelli was born in Bologna on 26 October 1818. He studied piano and composition, and in 1840, urged by Rossini, began to teach the piano at the music high school of his native city, a post he kept for thirty years. In 1842, Ferdinand Hiller heard him play in Bologna and encouraged him to embark on a concert career. Having launched into a concert career, Golinelli performed to great success in Italy and abroad (France, England and Germany). With Antonio Bazzini, he was one of the first Italian instrumental performers to be appreciated for his talent as a composer. Indeed, he was a rather prolific author: there are 234 numbers in his catalogue; to which one should add the works printed without opus number and those which remained unpublished. As a composer, Golinelli undoubtedly played an important role in the Italian musical renaissance, as Francesco Bussi recognised in an encyclopaedic entry dedicated to him: “Golinelli’s works reveal a cultural yearning unknown at the time, which urges the author to explore and incorporate, after a personal reconsideration and with intent to popularize, the new romanticism from beyond the Alps, using as stepping stone the formal principles of Beethoven’s classicism to reach, particularly in his sonatas and studies, Schumann-, Mendelssohn- and Chopin-like approaches.

The reputation of Joseph Joachim Raff was once so high that during the 1860s and 1870s he was regarded by many as the foremost symphonist of his day. His breakthrough came in 1863 when both his First Symphony and a cantata won major prizes. From then on his reputation rose inexorably until in 1877 he became the founding director of the prestigious Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. Although primarily known, then as now, as a symphonist, Raff was prolific in most genres; operas, choral works, chamber music and songs abound in his catalogue but by far his largest output was for the piano: there are over 130 works for the instrument, many of them with multiple movements or numbers.