Originally from Milan, Giovanna Gatto is a dynamic and multi-faceted pianist, who enjoys exploring a wide range of musical styles. She divides her time between Berne, Berlin and Milan.
The first volume of this first-ever complete survey of the piano music of Respighi (Toccata Classics, UK, 2019) was met with enthusiastic reviews. This project allowed her to work closely with the leading Respighi authority, the late Potito Pedarra.
Together with the UK soprano Lucy De Butts, she founded Emerald Ghost, a vocal-piano duo specialising in contemporary classical music. Their first CD Emerald Ghost – Copland X Galante: Song Cycles was released in 2021 on Paladino Records (AT). You can listen to it on Spotify or visit their website for more information.
Another unusual interest is her work and research in developing new compositions and transcriptions for accordion and piano, resulting in several premieres, including works by Carlo Galante, Fergus Johnstone, Giorgio Colombo Taccani, Alessio Manega, among others.
The project attracted sponsorship from Pro Helvetia, Fondation Suisa and Swiss performers SIG during the Classical: NEXT music meeting in Rotterdam 2018. The research sees the current collaboration of accordionist Pietro Paolo Antonucci. The first collection of unpublished or first Italian performance compositions will be published by Stradivarius (IT, 2023).
With her brother, the composer and producer Vito Gatto, she has performed electronic reworkings of classical masterpieces – for example, Debussy’s ‘Claire de Lune’, released by Decca in 2017.
Her discography also includes works by Akaishi, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Debussy, Prokofiev and Ravel.She has collaborated with the GAMO (Gruppo Aperto Musica Oggi) Ensemble and the Festival of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and performed numerous world premieres of contemporary music.She graduated in Piano Performance at the Conservatoire of Piacenza, where she studied with Maria Grazia Petrali. She obtained a first-class Master’s degree at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Como, studying with Roberto Stefanoni. After attending post-graduate courses at the Accademia S. Cecilia in Bergamo with Konstantin Bogino, she obtained further Masters in Performance and Music Pedagogy with Patricia Pagny at the Berne University of the Arts. She complemented her piano studies with harpsichord (Dirk Börner,) organ (Benjamin Righetti) and fortepiano (Edoardo Torbianelli).Always active in the exploration of the solo repertoire, she attended courses held by such renowned musicians as Alexander Lonquich, Konstantin Scherbakov, Aquiles Delle Vigne, Jeffrey Swann, Rodion Shchedrin, Pier Narciso Masi and Andrea Turini.
In his further development as a chamber musician in various ensembles, the courses held by Robert Levin, Teodoro Anzellotti, Patrick Jüdt, Conradin Brotbek, Ernesto Molinari, David Eggert, Thomas Riebl, Benjamin Schmidt, Peter Bruns, Corinna Belcea, and Francesco Gesualdi were fundamental.
She has performed at numerous other festivals in Italy and further afield in Europe – Croatia, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland – as a soloist and in chamber ensembles. The conductors with whom she worked include Riccardo Bovino, Massimo Merone, Simone Ori and Christopher Warren-Green, and her concerto appearances have featured Beethoven‘s Third Piano Concerto, Mozart’s Concertos k449 in E flat major and k466 in D minor and Bach‘s D minor Concerto. Her numerous awards in national and international competitions, both as a soloist and in chamber music, include sponsorship by the Inner Wheel Rotary Club, and her research into Respighi’s piano music won her sponsorship from the Iréne Dénéréaz Foundation in Lausanne.
She was also awarded a Bachelor’s degree in the Economy of the Arts, Culture and Communication at the Bocconi University in Milan.
Giovanna is an active piano and chamber-music teacher at the Valais Music Academy/Allgemeine Musikschule Oberwallis (AMO) in Switzerland. She’s also a piano professor at the Conservatorio C. Monteverdi in Cremona in Italy.
