Biography

I grew up in a small village in the Italian Alps, in Trentino. Running through the woods by bicycle or writing on top of a tree in a hunting lodge that I converted into a thinking place, and many other beautiful things of childhood. Stefano Fogliardi gave me the first piano lessons, in Trento, a place that back then seemed to me to be a huge city—all of a sudden, one had to be careful to cross the street! Right away I was admitted to the town’s Conservatory, entering the class of Antonella Costa, a passionate and very patient teacher. Particularly significant were the encounters with two other figures among the many who contributed to my formation: Franco Scala, first of all, inhibiting only up to a certain point with his words “you are a poet, here are the mastiffs…”; a long time later, Paul Badura-Skoda: it seemed to me to have next to me, at the other piano, Mozart or Beethoven or Schubert or Chopin in person, a particle accelerator.

My path had been a little eccentric. Rather soon, a voice inside me had erupted “you cannot spend your life playing for white hair!”, besides generating a certain perplexity about the conventional understanding of what a classical music concert was becoming in the 1990s—let alone what it has become today, a place where a Beethoven sonata is worth as much as the good wine one is toasting with at the interval—but I expand on this later. And so, while my colleagues were trying their hand at international piano competitions, I enrolled, as a working student, at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Bologna, graduating magna cum laude four years later. In the meantime, when I was deciding what to write my thesis on, came 9/11. From the plateau in Trentino, I wanted to fully descend into the world, live it, try to understand something more about its complexity. A scholarship allowed me to continue my studies in Political Theory at the famous London School of Economics. A lot of studying, and a lot of “placet experiri”, as Settembrini would have it. After London, I got into a doctoral program at the University of Trento, where I received my PhD in International Studies, and consequently was a”Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher” at Cambridge (2005-6), in the UK, and “Fulbright Visiting Researcher” at Princeton (2007), in the USA. The piano somewhat niched. But the Bildung I was acquiring was refracted through music. Thanks to the advice of a decisive figure for me, Professor Maurizio Viroli, I brought together the “human sciences”—to recall a novel (important for me, even too much) by Thomas Bernhard—and the world of sounds, firstly during a Post-Doc again at Princeton (“2009-10 Olin-Lehrman Postdoctoral Fellow”) where I tried to apply my theories on patriotism, multiculturalism and postnationalism (the subjects of my doctoral dissertation) to the operas of Giuseppe Verdi. After that first rapprochement, various musicological publications have followed: today, the output includes four books, three edited volumes, translations, and many papers. One of the volumes, written together with the distinguished musicologist Lawrence Kramer, carries the significant title Classical Music in a Changing World: Crisis and Vital Signs. Now that I too have white hair, I have perhaps finally realized that classical music need not necessarily be an elitist art that exists under mothballs. Classical music can be an expansive and redirective influence, under Hegelian Spirit. All this has brought me full-circle to give concerts and conferences in Italy, France (including at the Sorbonne), Germany, Austria, Greece, the Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Switzerland, the UK, the USA, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Armenia, Nigeria, the UAE, Kuwait… Interesting places. “Alberto Nones is a remarkable man who leads a double life”, someone wrote in an American magazine. Just two lives? Nay, dear Pirandello: One, None and a Hundred-Thousand!

Music holds everything together, politics and philosophy included—even in a small Mazurka by Chopin. Over two days of a torrid summer, cooled by almond granitas, I recorded in a studio at the foot of Mount Etna a complete set of the Mazurkas which was hailed as a revelation by the specialized critics; today, reissued by Halidon Music, it is traveling across digital platforms worldwide. Then came the second chapter of my work on Chopin, released by the English label Convivium Records: this time the Fantasies, and my interpretive reading—just slightly counterintuitive—of what a Fantasy means for the Polish composer. This album, recorded at the Fazioli Concert Hall, appeared almost simultaneously with another album that could not have been more different: music by the Russian Rachmaninov and the living Ukrainian composer Silvestrov, recorded on an old Bohemian piano. The idea here was that the sound—harsh for once, rather than polished as in most classical recordings (not to mention pop)—could shoulder a bit of truth, a bit of the pain of the world we are experiencing, and transform it into new energy, with Peace in mind, and a dialogue among peoples too often neglected. In the same spirit—one of cultural activism—I worked on several premiere recordings of works by the Palestinian composer Mahmoud Abuwarda (Gaza, 1990-): the nocturnes “Stars Over the Sleeping City”, “Scorched Hunger”, and “The Ones Who Believed”, as well as the composition for cello and piano “Fragments of Memory Falling”. As part of my complete Chopin project, the complete Nocturnes have recently appeared, immersed in the sidereal light of my reading, and lastly the complete Waltzes, including the unpublished work discovered in New York, for which I also gave the world premiere recording on a historical piano. The journey, both discographic and existential, continues. A new album featuring the Preludes and the Impromptus is currently being released.

If you write me through this website’s contact form, I will gladly read you. I can also be found at the Conservatory: I have tenure in Musicology and the History of Music at the “G. Rossini” Conservatory of Music of Pesaro. My teaching experience started back in 1999 and is at this point quite broad, multilingual and multidisciplinary. I have taught at the University of Lugano, the University of Trento, the Free University of Bolzano/Bozen, the University of the United Arab Emirates, the International High School of Rovereto, and the conservatories of Gallarate, Perugia, Como, Matera, and Foggia and Rodi Garganico – a great array of disciplines ranging from music (Piano, History of Music, Chamber Music) to the social sciences (Political Philosophy, Theory of International Politics, Political Communication, Ethics and Politics of Peabuilding, Critical Thinking and Creative Writing…), never sparing myself and always learning as much as I was teaching. I am also proud to have been appointed Honorary Visiting Teacher at the “E. Said” National Conservatory of Music, in Palestine, where I have met extraordinary youth, and hope to continue to do so. I stop here in this presentation, very personal but certainly not exhaustive. Listen to my music if you want to know more, about me… or maybe even about yourself, the collective. For in the music, there is everything.