Biography
Pianist and composer Arturo Stàlteri incorporates an unusually broad array of sources into his work, encompassing minimalism, Romantic repertoire, cinematic scoring, the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Rolling Stones, and additional strands, while also maintaining a parallel career as a radio broadcaster. Born in Rome on October 22, 1959, he spells his surname both with and without the diacritic, a practice reflected even on his official site. His father worked as a television journalist and his mother performed on piano, shaping parallel interests that surfaced early: by age eleven Stàlteri was already producing mock radio shows on a tape recorder, and in 1988 he joined the programming of Italy’s national network RAI, where he continued into the mid-2020s. His mother initiated his piano studies; in 1974 he joined multi-instrumentalist Gaio Chiocchio to form the progressive-rock group Pierrot Lunaire, issuing several albums with the band while simultaneously pursuing formal classical training. He received a diploma from the Alfredo Casella Conservatory in Aquila in 1979 after instruction from Ermanno Pradella, then studied with Vera Gobbi Belcredi between 1979 and 1985 and made repeated visits to Aldo Ciccolini in Paris; he also attended master classes led by Vincenzo Vitale and Konstantin Bogino. The album … and the peacock spoke to the moon, assembled from sessions recorded across the 1980s, appeared in 1987 and drew on Indian musical traditions; in 1998 he issued Circles, devoted to music by Philip Glass, on the Materiali label. Stàlteri characterizes his own idiom as Romantic Post-Minimalist, citing among his touchstones Wim Mertens, Chopin, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Brian Eno. His discography alternates original works with collections focused on other composers, chiefly minimalists and progressive-rock artists. Having first encountered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy at eighteen, he later produced several related recordings, among them Rings: Il Decimo Anella (2004). An admirer of The Rolling Stones, he included his own reading of “Ruby Tuesday” as a bonus track on the 2007 release Child of the Moon: Dieci Notturni e un’Alba, issued by Felmay, the same imprint that later handled Half Angels (2009) and In Sete Altere (2014). Stàlteri composed and performed a score for the 1921 silent film Selika and has worked extensively with other musicians; he has also appeared as a soloist, notably at the Piano City Napoli festival. In 2023 he returned to recording with Dodecagon, again featuring music by Glass and released on the composer’s Orange Mountain Music imprint.
Albums
