Pianist Gloria Campaner’s BBT win funds dance for L’Aquila

The Borletti-Buitoni Trust helps outstanding young musicians develop and sustain international careers with awards that fund tailor-made projects. BBT Fellowships are awarded to artists who are at the beginning of their careers and the Trust hopes their BBT budget will help develop their future potential. Winners are given awards of between £20,000 and £30,000.

One of the four Fellowship winners this year was Venetian-born pianist Gloria Campaner.

She has already won more than 20 competitions, including 1st Prize and Prokofiev Special Award at the 2009 IBLA Grand Prize and the Silver Medal at Los Angeles Paderewski International Piano Competition.

Walter Arlen for the Los Angeles Times praised her,

…extremely deep musicality, remarkable fluidity, nuancing and sense of style.

Campaner's début CD Piano Poems, featuring music by Schumann and Rachmaninov, was released by EMI in 2013 with a second to follow this year, and she has performed with La Scala Philharmonic in Milan among many other orchestras and ensembles, with television and radio broadcasts of her concerts. Soon she will be seen with the Royal Concertgebouw soloists for chamber music in both Amsterdam and Italy.

The BBT Fellowship doesn't just stop with the handing over of a cheque, but they provide advice, guidance and contacts as well as public relations exposure for the artists. Campaner says,

The BBT award was a wonderful surprise, not only for the support and visibility it offers in the United Kingdom and London – which for music nowadays is one of the most important cultural nerve-centres – but also because it puts you together with a fantastic team, those of the Trust as well as Mitsuko Uchida, an extraordinary woman and a superlative musician.

Obviously the fact that I'm the first Italian pianist to be awarded the prize has also had an important impact in Italy too.

Past winners have used their award money to assist with purchasing instruments, while others have used funds for PR campaigns, photographs, publicity folders and websites. Budgets have also been used for survival money, studying and travel costs. There are no set criteria: winners are encouraged to be creative and to use their awards in a way that will help to establish and build their careers.

The money awarded can be used in any way you chose fit as long as it is used in a precise and balanced way to further the career. Luckily there are three years during which you can decide on what's best and at this time I still haven't decided exactly what I shall do with it all.

However, I've already made a small investment to fix my Steinway B, because it's vital to feel happy with your instrument with which you spend the vast amount of your time. Also, recently, a beautiful documentary was made possible about my HumoreQues | Heroes Quest project.

With support of the Trust, Gloria Campaner was able to produce Luca Scarzella's film HumoreQues, a documentary of a piano and dance fusion piece commissioned for the opening of Renzo Piano's remarkable new Auditorium del Parco in earthquake-stricken L'Aquila in Abruzzo, Italy.

This was something I'd dreamed about for years, tied in with my unbridled passion for dance. I used to study dance when I was little, and hoped that the time would come when I could somehow be part of a dance work on stage.

HumoresQues is not only a piece about new music and contemporary dance, but a trio of artists who in interchange their roles on stage: they accompany, follow, interact and create… synaesthetic in every sense.

The piece has been greatly appreciated and been signed up by the Accademia Filarmonica Romana's Teatro Olimpico for next spring. For us that's a great victory!

Dutch ensemble Gotra Ballet di Heerlen, directed and choreographed by Joost Vrouenraets, dance while  Campaner performs pieces by Rihm, Schumann, Widmann and Marton Illes:

Photo of Gloria Campaner by Marizio Montani

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano') about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman's Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia' column for Dancing Times magazine.