Gianluca Cascioli

Gianluca Cascioli maintains an active profile across piano performance, orchestral direction, and composition, with a particular focus on twentieth-century and present-day repertoire that incorporates his own creations. His discography also encompasses core classical works, issued primarily through Deutsche Grammophon.

Born July 17, 1979, in Turin, Italy, he completed his training at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in that city, where Alessandro Ruo Rui and Alberto Colla instructed him in composition and Franco Scala oversaw his piano development.

Victory at the Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition in Milan in 1994 marked his decisive breakthrough. The win secured a Deutsche Grammophon contract, and he inaugurated his recording career in 1997 with a program uniting works by Beethoven, Webern, Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Boulez.

Subsequent releases for the label featured an all-Beethoven recital and a collection of his original cello compositions performed with cellist Enrico Bronzi.

He has appeared as piano soloist with leading orchestras worldwide, among them the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, and Chicago Symphony.

In his conducting role he has directed the Deutsche Kammerorchester Frankfurt, while several of his pieces have received hearings in European settings; these include the Sonatina of 2004, presented at the Hamburg Musikfest, a symphony, a violin-and-piano sonata, and a set of variations for piano.

An avid chamber musician, Cascioli has collaborated with such distinguished artists as cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, violinist Yuri Bashmet, and clarinetist Sabine Meyer.

In 2010 he partnered with 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”).

He returned to the studio in 2021 on the Harmonia Mundi label to perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, and the work labeled Piano Concerto No. 6, Op. 61a, the composer’s own transcription of his Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, for piano and orchestra.