An interview to Ingrid Carbone published on the website of CIDIM (Italian National Committee of Music) during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
How do you spend your time and what are you doing on a musical level?
My work never stops, I’m never bored. During the lockdown I felt privileged: staying at home to play and spending hours and hours with my piano did not make me perceive the difficulties generally experienced by those who felt “closed in like a prison”. The work of a musician requires discipline, perseverance, patience, concentration, and many other qualities that require “permanence”. In addition, since my latest Schubert CD “L’Enchantement Retrouvé” was released in February, during the lockdown I was busy with radio interviews (such as Radio Classica and Rete Toscana Classica) and with interviews with specialist and non-specialist magazines (such as blogdellamusica. eu and italiani.it). Despite the lockdown, I managed to send my CD to the jury of the Global Music Awards, a prestigious US award born in California in 2011: in April 2020, I learned that my CD had been awarded a Global Music Awards, and my satisfaction it was truly great considering that I was the only Italian pianist awarded with a classical CD.
And then I sent my last CD and my first on Liszt “Les Harmonies de l’Esprit” to the prestigious Belgian magazine Klassiek Centraal, and at the end of May a beautiful 5-star review was published about me and both my two CDs. As for studying, I’ve been very busy with four live Facebook concerts, during which I always played different songs. But I’m continuing to play Schubert, the four Impromptus op. 90 and the six Moments Musicaux op. 94 contained in the CD, in anticipation of the resumption of concerts. Furthermore, I am studying Liszt’s Legend of “St. Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds”, which will be featured on my next CD. And I’m also working on Liszt’s “Malédiction”, a concerto for piano and string orchestra that I plan to play in January in several venues, hoping the schedule doesn’t fall through. It is an extremely demanding piece from a musical and above all technical point of view, which really requires a lot of work. And finally, being also a Mathematics researcher at the University of Calabria, I worked from home, this time in a completely exceptional way, with remote meetings, remote seminars, remote exams.
