Press

Throughout the recital her tone is glorious — rounded and particularly bell-like in the higher registers. […] Mariani is quite the Schumannian. She brings passion, thoughtfulness, and real musicality to music which in lesser hands could sound simply frantic or — even worse — empty.

My energy comes from the mind. By starting from awareness of my own limitations, I developed a deep understanding of my potential. […] For me, positivity means shifting ambition from what you can have to what you can be. […] Playing all the notes is necessary, but it is not enough.

What emerged was the distinctive mark of a performer able to combine rigour and freedom, and above all to give the romantic repertoire a thinking dimension. […] The fine performances opened with Mendelssohn's «Variations sérieuses», played with a convincing balance of architecture, expressive tension and clarity of detail.

Lyricism is joined by a melancholy deeply felt by the performer, who plays the difficult passages with a velvety and never inappropriate touch. […] A musical work of high artistic value.

Rather than present a histrionic, psychic turbulence-fixated treatment another might gravitate towards, Mariani opts for a poised presentation that while refined doesn't compromise on «Sturm und Drang».

But the real surprise of the CD is Mariani's own composition, which fits perfectly into the repertoire, showing her talent not only as a performer but also as a creator. Her works are imbued with a lyrical and poetic dimension able to converse, on equal terms, with the myths and memories evoked by the other two composers.

Her skillful and idiomatic piano writing falls easily on the ear, as well as her consistent and often surprising harmonic invention.

Mariani's readings of the waltzes by the two great composers are marked by spontaneity and conversational freshness. […] Three very well written pieces by a composer-pianist who deserves careful listening.

With an admirable command of the musical material, shaped by a subtle intensity that careful listening finds in the low register. […] The composer draws on the great lesson of the past to shape her creative urgency.

The pianist Maria Gabriella Mariani, who has already released several projects with Da Vinci, turns here — both as performer and as composer — to a repertoire in which dance has a particular importance.

Mariani's playing does not disappoint. Essentially at ease with Debussy, and truly brilliant and effective in Poulenc. […] A great balance and respect for the score, together with noteworthy technical efficiency.

I realised that narrative writing and the score had to go in tandem, flowing into each other in a kind of liberating circularity. […] I respect the avant-gardes. But for me tonal harmony is like grammar in speech. It lets me communicate better.

Her latest album should not have been called «Visions» but, like her own composition, «Mediterranea». For these are essentially Mediterranean-hued sonorities, which in Maria Gabriella Mariani's playing take shape as a coherent narrative. […] The key to this homogeneous whole is her interpretation, born of the spirit of improvisation.

Instead of resorting to the «rediscovered manuscript», a device tried and tested from Manzoni to Eco, Maria Gabriella Mariani opens a path of her own, beginning by distancing herself from the title of Goya's painting, which spoke of «sleep» while she speaks of «dreams». […] In this way the author brushes against the mystery of life and of dreaming, and renders it in plain literary coin.

Mariani's Debussy is never mannered: it is as refined as it is passionate. […] It is the music as played by Maria Gabriella Mariani that imposes itself, claiming — almost shouting — a right to exist.

In «Visions» the pianist and composer Maria Gabriella Mariani ennobles eclecticism — here understood as the interpenetration of forms apparently unconnected yet intrinsically bound together — and does so to a degree of absolute perfection. […] The performances are marked by a sunlit luminosity in which the phrasing dissolves into a palette of colours always finely balanced between rigour and imagination.

Mariani's own Suite is certainly not out of place in such company: if anything it is a useful narrative development of it, and «Chef Tango» is a fascinating case in point.

The sleep of reason breeds monsters is an Enlightenment aphorism; Maria Gabriella's is enlightening, because it urges us to connect our dreams with our plans for life. […] There is no autobiography in Mariani's novel, which carefully and artfully avoids it after circling it from every side.

It is hard to rein in the darting spirit of Maria Gabriella Mariani, always a wanderer among manifold beauties. […] here is her latest jewel of recorded tailoring, in which the Campanian performer takes pleasure in suggesting secret affinities between France and Russia at the turn of the century. An intoxicating fresco steeped in a South that is breathed but above all evoked, under the sign of fleetingness, where all at once the narrator becomes an author too.

Visions is a marvellous title; quite apart from the obvious reference to Prokofiev's fleeting chimeras it also ably sums up the other works here.

Maria Gabriella Mariani's new CD reveals once again the qualities of this Neapolitan musician, both as a performer and as a composer.

We meet a very particular kind of writing in Maria Gabriella Mariani, who often plays with her alter ego. […] Reading these pages one has the illusion of meeting many shadows moving in a play of mirrors.

Besides being a gifted pianist, Mariani is a composer and also a writer of texts closely interwoven with the music she performs or composes. She is a singular case in the music of our time. […] Mariani's works are a self-analysis that the author carries out with words or with sounds, with a therapeutic intent. […] Like Pirandello's characters, her sound-characters act and watch themselves acting, forming relationships among themselves in a circular shape.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to define Maria Gabriella Mariani's «Ologramma». […> On closer inspection it is a self-analysis that the author, a many-sided and versatile personality, carries out on herself with an openly therapeutic purpose.

There is the ravishing enchantment of dialogue, which delights the reader and captivates on every page, confirming Mariani's great gift for recitative and conversation, as befits a complete and sparkling writer.

I feel like a humanist at heart. In my own small way, what fascinates me about Renaissance thought is its holistic conception, the idea of a boundless enquiry, adventurous and powerful, pushed to the limits of knowledge: life seen as a palette in which everything was interwoven. […] I like to explore every perspective of knowledge, to make it matter for communication, and to give a part of myself in each declination of my art.

The world of miniatures — of small truths clotted into intimate vignettes in which abysses of meaning not rarely dwell — is one particularly familiar to Maria Gabriella Mariani. An enchanted garden that her performing signature enjoys exploring with grace and authority. […] Set between these two worlds is the poetic voice of the performer turned author: miniatures within miniatures, tapestries of keen beauty called upon to weave the fabric of the tale.

As a performer Mariani proves a fine and sensitive interpreter, both when she measures herself against the two short «classic» masterpieces by Schumann and Debussy and when she offers her own creations.

In her own way Maria Gabriella Mariani has created a multi-dimensional art in which words, music, and life mingle and merge. […] Mariani has created her own musical world, and the pleasure of entering it as a listener comes from her generosity and gift for beauty.

Improvisation is the truest part of me; it is a way to converse with my audience. I cannot prepare it: it would bother me, it would seem like a foreign body.