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 a Bechstein pianist.
Award-winning in the USA at the “Global Music Awards” international competition, Ingrid Carbone is awarded six medals: in December 2022, she receives two silver medals for her double CD “Leoncavallo: Pour Piano” in the “From opera to piano” and “Instumentalist” categories; in August 2021 she receives a silver medal for her CD “Le sentiment de la nature” dedicated to Liszt and released in May 2021; in 2020 receives three bronze medals, one in March (the only Italian pianist awarded) for her CD on Schubert “L’Enchantement Retrouvé”, and two in December (the only classical musician to receive two awards for two works) for her dedicated CD to Liszt “Les Harmonies de l’Esprit” and for the live performance of Consolation n. 2 performed in concert in Konstanz, Germany on the occasion of the international photographic exhibition “Women of Mathematics throughout Europe – A Gallery of Portraits”.
Her two latest CDs, “Leoncavallo: Pour Piano” and “Le sentiment de la nature”, have also been nominated at the 2023 International Classical Musical Awards (ICMA) and the 2022 International Classical Musical Awards (ICMA).
During the worldwide competition IBLA Grand Prize, the New York IBLA Foundation awarded her in 2016 the Scarlatti Special Mention, in 2017 the Piano Special Mention, and in 2015, 2016 and 2017 accounts her among “outstanding professionals whodeserve the attention of the international public at large”, judging her “in reference to a standard of excellence at all times”.
In 2020, the Conservatory of Music of Cosenza, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary celebration ceremony, selected Mrs Carbone as one of the brightest and most successful students that the Conservatory has had, and awarded her “for her highly prestigious artistic activity“.
In 2021, Ingrid Carbone received the “Città di Montalto Uffugo” Career Award “for her extraordinary artistic career that has brought prestige to the whole of Calabria” (Montalto Uffugo is the place where Ruggero Leoncavallo spent his childhood).
Mrs Carbone has performed for several associations, foundations, theaters and conservatories of music (Austria, China, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Poland, Spain, Slovenia).
Beside the concert activity, Ingrid Carbone is interested to spread musical and cultural knowledge through lecture – concerts, and she is very engaged in social issues.
In 2018 Mrs Carbone has founded the Musical Association “Clara Schumann” , of which she is the President.
Mrs Carbone began her musical education in Italy, at the Conservatory of Music of Cosenza, her home town, where she studied with Maria Laura Macario and Flavio Meniconi, and achieved her piano Diploma with full marks at the age of nineteen with Francesco Monopoli. There she studied Composition, too.
She attended several Master Classes in Italy and abroad at prestigious academies such as the Internationale Sommerakademie – Universität Mozarteum in Salzburg, and the Tel-Hai International Piano Master Classes in Israel, with internationally renowned pianists such as Lazar Berman, Aquiles delle Vigne, Andrzej Pikul, Cristiano Burato, and with the argentinian pianist and composer Eduardo Ogando.
Eclectic personality, she graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics at the University of Calabria (Italy) at age 21. She moved to the University of Bari (Italy) when she became Assistant Professor in Mathematics at age 27. She is the author of articles, published by international journals, and was invited to give talks and conferences in Europe and Canada. Currently, she is Assistant Professor at the University of Calabria, where she teaches mathematics and where she also was the President of the Scientific Library for some years.
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
“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.”
★★★★★
“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.”
«[“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».
★★★★
“A lunar sheen hovers over Ingrid Carbone’s Liszt.”
– CD Le Sentiment de la Nature, Da Vinci Publishing
“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.”
“… 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.”
“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.”
“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. “