Active as a pianist, conductor, and composer,
Gianluca Cascioli has championed 20th century and contemporary music, including his own. He has also recorded mainstream repertory, mostly for the Deutsche Grammophon label.
Cascioli was born on July 17, 1979, in Turin, Italy. He attended the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory there, studying composition with Alessandro Ruo Rui and
Alberto Colla and piano with Franco Scala. A major break came in 1994 when
Cascioli won the Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition in Milan. Part of his prize was a contract with Deutsche Grammophon, and he began his recording career in 1997 with an album of
works by Beethoven, Webern, Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Boulez. He recorded several more albums for Deutsche Grammophon, including an all-Beethoven disc and a group of his own cello works with cellist
Enrico Bronzi.
Cascioli has appeared as a piano soloist with some of the world's top orchestras, including the
Berlin Philharmonic,
Vienna Philharmonic, and
Chicago Symphony. As a conductor, he has led the Deutsche Kammerorchester Frankfurt, and a number of his compositions have been played in European venues, including his Sonatina (2004), played at the Hamburg Musikfest, a symphony, a violin-and-piano sonata, and a set of variations for piano. An enthusiastic chamber music player,
Cascioli numbers various prestigious musicians among his collaborators, such as cellist
Mstislav Rostropovich, violinist
Yuri Bashmet, and clarinetist
Sabine Meyer. In 2010,
Cascioli joined violinist
Sayaka Shoji for a recording of
Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 12, and Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op. 47 ("Kreutzer). In 2021, he returned to the
recording studio on the Harmonia Mundi label, performing
Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, and what was termed the Piano Concerto No. 6, Op. 61a,
Beethoven's transcription of his Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, for piano and orchestra. ~ James Manheim