TROPOS ENSEMBLE

Working alongside David Ortolá in our Tropos Ensemble project has been, by a long chalk, the first great artistic adventure of my life. Since 2012, when we started to give it shape amidst the chain reaction started by the 20 años 20 pianos concert (July 2, 2011), not a day has passed without my activities somehow linking to what our Tropos Ensemble represents. It came from a very simple idea, and not a particularly original one: to overlay new material on performances of extant classical works. The plan was for me to play pieces that all of us are more or less familiar with, while David creates new layers of sound creating a dialogue between the old and the new. Over time, however, the project has found its own pathways.

Now we don’t quite know who is the composer, nor where the written material ends or where the improvisation begins; the piano has ceased to be our exclusive starting point, and the electronic reworking of sound we decided to apply to our first album, A Noise of Creation, has now taken its way into our shows and has inspired decisions which were certainly not in the initial plot.

What was originally just a simple intuitive spark has increasingly become the axis of this whole story: sounding out the spaces in which the line between composition and performance blurs or breaks. Applying leverage to the incoherences of a system that has artificially generated diametrically-opposed capacities and spheres of action between the creators of works and those charged with presenting them to audiences—this is what we are trying to do through Tropos. And we want this troposal to go on finding the same anarchic joy long into the unforeseeable future.

Tropos Ensemble official website: www.troposensemble.com

IN-VERSIONS
Unconventional musicology-based approaches to classical-music performance

Musicological research can prove an unparalleled stimulus for bringing ideas to performance. But I have long been aware that performance can just as easily feed back to musicological thinking. And this is not all. Very often these synergies reveal no clear unidirectional trajectory. I experience this fertile collision with growing interest, in particular because of its potential to reshape our historiographic, stylistic, and professional categories.

With this in mind, in the summer of 2018 I launched this new personal project, designed for a four-year period: concerts, talks, recordings, and other initiatives, some addressed to an academic environment, others to general audiences, the common thread being my yearning to offer alternative ways to perform the classical-music repertoire from a starting point of unconventional musicology-based approaches.

In-Versions project official website: www.in-versions.com

Recordings

• inVersions (2021, 2 CDs): Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata & 9 Etudes by Montgeroult (on sale at chiantore.bandcamp.com).
• inVersions (2022, digital version): Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata & Montgeroult’s 9 Etudes (full digital download at chiantore.bandcamp.com).
• Open Works (forthcoming, 2025): my inVersions of Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Granados’ Valses Poéticos, and Szymanowska’s Fantasy in F Major.

THE SPHERICAL PIANO

The Spherical Piano explores the relationship between music and spatial imagination through immersive auditory experiences that challenge the static nature of the piano. By delving into the potential of creative layering and binaural editing, audio engineer Ronald Ayala and I have crafted three-dimensional audio recordings of twelve works from the classical repertoire, as well as a series of binaural pieces expressly conceived for this joint venture, fostering innovative processes of transdisciplinary interaction between composition, performance, and music production.

The dual release of the 360º Binaural Version and the Panoramic Stereo Version of the same album, in December 2024, is accompanied by a detailed written essay documenting the research behind this thoughtful initiative, which encompassed distinct phases from June 2020 to November 2024.

The Spherical Piano project official website: www.musikeon.net/thesphericalpiano

Recordings

• The Spherical Piano (2024, CD and Digital release): Panoramic Stereo recordings of works by Montgeroult, Chopin, Szymanowska, Franck, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, and Wieck, plus my Five Binaural Etudes (2020) and other short works.
• The Spherical Piano (2024, Digital release): 360º Binaural recordings of works by Montgeroult, Chopin, Szymanowska, Franck, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, and Wieck, plus my Five Binaural Etudes (2020) and other short works.