Italian pianist Ingrid Carbone plays Liszt with a clear head, finely regulated dynamics, admirably colorful touch and plenty of poetic vision.The music is thus a very serious matter for her, requiring the utmost clarity and transparency in the tonal language, but she allows moods and changes of mood to flow in with great sensitivity. So, the well-shaped interpretations are neither sentimental nor undercooled, but of a remarkable emotional justness.The sound recording is clear and pleasant. Remy Franck, Pizzicato (2022)

But it is certainly a very fine recording – among the very best new recordings of these works that I have heard in recent years. What is compelling about her performances, overall, is the way in which she balances the claims of melody and structure in her playing of these ten short, but pre-eminently mature, pieces. The very least one can – should – say is that Carbone is already a very accomplished pianist of real insight, […] her abilities are clearly not limited to the piano. At the age of 21 she graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics […] Carbone brings to her performances at the piano a mind which ranges beyond music. Glyn Purlsglove, MusicWeb International, 2020

After her very successful Schubert recital [L’enchantement retrouvé] the Italian pianist Ingrid Carbone has once again asserted herself with this new Liszt album [Les harmonies de l’esprit] as a musician who does not slavishly follow what others have done so often before her, but has managed to put her own stamp on these nine pieces thanks to her imaginative playing. to make. That is, it cannot be said often enough, not a matter of ‘swimming’ or playing to the superficial effect, but through often minuscule dynamic accents, the highlighting of a chord or sometimes not even more than a single note, a phrasing that with the eye and ear focused on plastic expressiveness, therefore reaching just a little further and allowing the balance between left and right hand to weigh in that same force field. While eye and ear must also be focused on the architecture of the whole!  Aart van der Waal, Opus Kassiek, 2020

Ingrid Carbone is an Italian pianist. She is a Bechstein pianist and records for the Osaka-based label Da Vinci Publishing, Japan.

International recognition began in 2016, when the New York IBLA Foundation awarded her the Scarlatti Special Mention and in 2017 the Piano Special Mention, but it is her discography that brought the spotlight onto her. In 2019 her debut CD Liszt: Les Harmonies de l’Esprit was released, in 2020 Schubert: L’Enchantement Retrouvé, in 2021 Liszt: Le Sentiment de la Nature and in 2022 the double CD Leoncavallo: Pour Piano [Complete Works], containing all the piano compositions by Ruggiero Leoncavallo.

Multiple winners in the USA at the international Global Music Awards competition, between 2020 and 2023 Ingrid Carbone was awarded eight medals: two bronze medals in 2020 for the first two CDs and one for a live recording in Konstanz, Germany; a silver medal in 2021 for the third CD; two silver medals in 2022 for the latest double CD on Leoncavallo, two silver medals in 2023 for the live recording of Granadinas by Ruggiero Leoncavallo. The last two albums received a nomination each in the 2022 and 2023 editions of the International Classical Music Awards, which are for classical music what the Oscars are for cinema.

Her albums are sold all over the world and have received unanimous appreciation from national and international specialist critics, with reviews in the most accredited magazines, such as Tokyo M-Plus in Japan, Pizzicato in Luxembourg, Opus Klassiek in Holland, MusicWeb International in England, Klassiek Centraal in Belgium, as well as in all the classical magazines in Italy such as Rivista Musica, Amadeus, Suonare News and Classic Voice.

She has been present for years on national and international radio and television channels, such as Radio Svizzera Italiana, Radio Romania and, in Italy, Sky TV Classica HD (an entire episode of the broadcast Mestiere Teatro dedicated to her) and the national RAI Radio 3 (a dozen times on Primo Movimento, Radio3Suite and Piazza Verdi), and many more. She has performed in Europe, China, Israel, Palestinian territories and Jordan, where has held concerts, lecture-concerts, piano teaching lectures and masterclasses also in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Krakow, the Italian Consulate in Jerusalem and the Italian Embassy in Amman. In addition to her concert activity, Ingrid Carbone is interested in the diffusion of music and culture through lecture-recitals and is very involved in social issues, including charity concerts. She promotes Italy abroad always playing music by Italian composers (such as Leoncavallo) and compositions dedicated to Italy.

Ingrid Carbone began her musical education at the Conservatory of Music in Cosenza, her hometown, where she studied with Maria Laura Macario and Flavio Meniconi, and obtained her piano diploma with full marks at age 19 with Francesco Monopoli. At the Conservatory she also studied Composition. Her Alma Mater selected her among the students of its first 50 years of life with the best artistic career.

She studied in Italy and abroad at prestigious academies such as the Internationale Sommerakademie – Universität Mozarteum of Salzburg, the Tel-Hai International Piano Master Classes in Israel and the Associazione Cultura e Musica G. Curci in Italy, and specialized with renowned pianists including Lazar Berman, Cristiano Burato, Aquiles delle Vigne, Andrzej Pikul and the Argentine pianist and composer Eduardo Ogando.

An eclectic personality, she has always cultivated a passion for mathematics, which led her to graduate at age 21 with top marks and honors from the University of Calabria (Italy). At age 27 she became assistant professor at the University of Bari. She has given communications and conferences in Europe and Canada. She currently teaches Mathematical Analysis at the University of Calabria, where she also held the position of President of the Scientific Library for several years.

Her academic training has influenced her artistic activity, allowing her to develop an original communication strategy that is highly appreciated by the public.

Reviews (excerpts)

“Precious values thus emerge in Lisztian writing, enhanced in its complexity thanks to an analytical and lucid gaze.”

– CD Le Sentiment de la Nature, Da Vinci Publishing

Letizia Michielon

Amadeus 2022 *****

“Almost all recordings of this work count on a «Pianism» very specific and the one by Ms. Carbone as well as her musical approach is very fluently, and very physically giving a unique message. In short, her music loses the stiff body, when this happens – losing stiff – first comes hurt, but after it turn in a pleasant feeling. I find this feeling especially in “Impromptu No.1” and in the last number of “Moments Musicaux”. Every note has a peculiar sound and life, and each one note touch my spirit as well as my heart loose its stiffness. This CD will be in my love listening collection.”

Kitao Michifuyu

Rekoodo Geijutsu レコード芸術 2021

★★★

“Ms Carbone remains very faithful and pure to the score. She is herself exactly like the composer she plays. This is a gift that great talents have: the ability to put themselves in the place of the other without imposing themselves and in any case remain tied to the composer and his work. It makes the message clearer, more pleasant and understandable; something that only genes manage to do so deeply in their work. The composer and the pianist together make music eternal, which we hope many generations after us can remain involved, inspired, moved, and make us hope and desire.”

Ludwig van Mechelen

Klassiek Central 2020

«[“L’enchantement retrouve” presents] a series of reliefs that this magnific pianist highlights in Schubert’s own compositional structure. A lot of breath, a lot of accentuation of these soft but very audacious modulation passages typical of Schubert’s composition».

«[In the various pieces], the descriptive-narrative capacity that Ms Carbone has even in absolute, abstract music, [with the use of] a very warm and enveloping sound, with the capacity for extremely fascinating lyricism».

Anna Menichetti

ReteDueCinque 2020

★★★

“A lunar sheen hovers over Ingrid Carbone’s Liszt.”

– CD Le Sentiment de la Nature, Da Vinci Publishing

Luca Segalla

Rivista Musica 2021

“It is certainly a very fine recording – among the very best new recordings of these works that I have heard in recent years. […]
What is compelling about her performances, overall, is the way in which she balances the claims of melody and structure in her playing of these ten short, but pre-eminently mature, pieces. […]
The very least one can – should – say is that Carbone is already a very accomplished pianist of real insight, and that she shows promising signs of becoming an even more remarkable and important artist.”

Glyn Pursglove

MusicWeb International 2020

“… the spell can strike again and again. As Ingrid Carbone demonstrates with her new album, which was not without reason given the title “L’Enchantement retrouvé”: in this case the spell that could (had to) be rediscovered in her eyes and that she managed to redeem with the heart and soul. [… Ingrid Carbone] Provides a convincing display of what will always remain a fascinating landscape in my ears.”

Aart van der Wal

Opus Klassiek 2020

“Superb Liszt-interpretation”
“Italian pianist Ingrid Carbone plays Liszt with a clear head, finely regulated dynamics, admirably colorful touch and plenty of poetic vision.The music is thus a very serious matter for her, requiring the utmost clarity and transparency in the tonal language, but she allows moods and changes of mood to flow in with great sensitivity. So, the well-shaped interpretations are neither sentimental nor undercooled, but of a remarkable emotional justness.The sound recording is clear and pleasant.”

Remy Franck

Pizzicato 2021

 “The fluidity of the touch is combined, in the interpretation of the pianist, with a refined agogic that does not yield to the spectacle (a trap, this, in perennial ambush in the central section, the one called” all’ongarese “), transforming itself into a sound painting . […] the last Impromptu in A flat major shows a reading in which tactile liquidity predominates, with the piano keyboard transmuting into the famous main theme in a luminescent stream […]. With this “liquidity” it is as if the artist from Cosenza wanted to remember how Schubert intended the concept of pianism; a pianism free from the laws of concertism, at the antipodes of both the way of treating the piano as Liszt did, as well as far, far away, from that peaceful and crepuscular virtuosity emanated by Chopin, as his priority was to make the instrument “sing” . A “cantabilità” that reaches its peak precisely with the Impromptus and the Moments Musicaux, whose “communicability” is rendered internally thanks to knowing how to sing them with your fingers, because only singing, rendered with another voice, can express the plethora of emotions and sensations that lurk in these short pages. “

Andrea Bedetti

Music Voice 2020 4,5/ 5