Lorenzo Meo

An Italian pianist and composer based in Switzerland, Lorenzo Meo moves between the classical tradition and the expressive frontiers of contemporary music. His pianistic language, recognisable for its intensity and clarity, takes shape in a timbral and interpretive exploration that avoids conventional solutions, in a personal synthesis of formal complexity and expressive depth.

His repertoire ranges from Baroque and Classical music to new music, with particular dedication to twenty-first-century composers, frequently the dedicatee of their world premieres. He made his debut as soloist with Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 and Mozart's K. 491. He has performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Sala Santa Cecilia of the Auditorium Parco della Musica and the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome, the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, the Auditorium de la Cité de la musique in Strasbourg, the National Philharmonic in Lviv, and the Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv.

His discography includes works by Jaan Rääts, whose Piano Concertos No. 2 and No. 3 he premiered in Italy and the United States, as well as music by Erkki-Sven Tüür, Arnold Schoenberg, Toru Takemitsu, Sergei Rachmaninov, Erik Satie and several living composers. With violinist Anastasiya Petryshak, with whom he has collaborated regularly since 2014, he recently recorded an album of music by Debussy, Ravel and Messiaen, released by Sony Music.

As a composer he has developed a neoclassical, minimalist-rooted language. It is a music that rejects ostentatious complexity and seeks a direct relationship with the listener, while carrying the traces of a classical and avant-garde formation. Micropolyphonic textures, modal sensibilities, synaesthetic timbres are woven into suspended pages, built upon subtle nuances and active silences, where the neoclassical framework is crossed by polystylistic incursions, memories of different eras resurfacing in the writing. A stillness that is never inertia: it can break, in passages of disruptive intensity, always out of inner necessity, never in pursuit of effect.

Lorenzo Meo trained at the G.B. Martini Conservatory in Bologna, later perfecting his skills as soloist, chamber musician and composer at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome and the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK), and with masters including Konstantin Bogino, Boris Bekhterev, Paul Badura-Skoda and Paolo Bordoni.