Horacio Lavandera LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN

Horacio Lavandera (born Buenos Aires, December 1984) is an Argentine pianist, currently residing in Madrid, Spain. As the youngest competitor at the age of sixteen, he won the International Piano Competition Umberto Micheli, held at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatoire and in Teatro alla Scala in Milan. He has been invited to perform as a soloist with prestigious orchestras, as well as to offer recitals in America, Europe, and Asia. 

Lavandera began studying music at a very early age with his father, a percussionist, who taught him the basics of percussion and music theory. He started piano studies at age seven under pianist Martha Freigido, who graduated from Scaramuzza’s School of Music. Five years later, he furthered his musical training with Maestro Antonio De Raco. He has taken composition and analysis classes with Mrs. Graciela Tarchini, Professor of Musical Analysis and Resident Composer of the University of Buenos Aires. He was also advised by great maestros such as Daniel Barenboim, Martha Argerich, and Charles Rosen. In July 2001 he was awarded a scholarship by the Italian Embassy and the Comitato Nazionale Italiano Musica to take part of a seminary given by Maestro Maurizio Pollini in the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena (Italy). In October 2003, he was awarded a scholarship by Juventudes Musicales de Madrid to take the post-graduate course of Piano Interpretation at the University of Alcalá (Spain), under the guidance of Maestro Josep Colom, with whom he currently studies. 

Horacio Lavandera DINO SALUZZI Imágenes

Imágenes features premiere recordings of Dino Saluzzi’s music for piano. The pieces gathered together here, written between 1960 and 2002, were variously conceived in Salta and Buenos Aires and on the road. Periodically, the great bandoneonist has set aside the instrument which has accompanied him for more than seven decades, to find expression by other means. Over the years, of course, he has written the most diverse music for ensembles of many kinds, including chamber music for his Kultrum collaboration with the ‘Rosamunde Quartett’, pieces for duo with classical cellist Anja Lechner, and works for orchestra performed and recorded with the Metropole Orchestra in Amsterdam’s Musiekgebouw. On Imagénes, Horacio Lavandera, a gifted Argentine pianist specialized in both classical music and contemporary composition – he studied with Maurizio Pollini and Charles Rosen, and has collaborated with Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel – proves to be an ideal Saluzzi interpreter, attuned both to his love of his homeland and his artistic need to travel widely.

Lavandera recorded these pieces, under the supervision of the composer, and with Manfred Eicher as producer, at Oslo’s Rainbow studio in October 2013. The album is issued in time for Dino Saluzzi’s 80^th birthday on May 20.