LDV109

32 RAVEL ∙ THE SOLO PIANO WORKS It is from Italy that he takes his name and the passion concealed within him, which gives him his vibrancy when he is on stage. The passion that overwhelms his audience. Italy sings in him with the colours of its language, so familiar to him, of its Mediterranean exuberance in which his childhood was bathed. But it was in Nice that Philippe Bianconi was born and raised, and it was France that moulded him. Which is why artist and man alike are a blend of poise and ardour, discretion and inner flame, clothed in an elegance and a luminosity that may be read in his presence, in his eyes, and can be savoured when he is at the piano. As a young man, he progressed by leaps and bounds, propelled into international competitions by Pierre Cochereau as soon as he left the Nice Conservatoire. His career path was marked out from the day he entered the class of Simone Delbert- Février, a student of Marguerite Long and Robert Casadesus. ‘Sing!’, ‘Listen!’: even today, he can still hear the injunctions of that refined, enthusiastic woman, stirred by an inner fire, and he utters them in his turn to the students he trains at the École Normale de Musique de Paris.