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 tocc 0405) was met with enthusiastic reviews.
Her discography also includes works by Akaishi, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Debussy, Prokofev and Ravel.
She graduated in Piano Performance at the Conservatoire of Piacenza, where she studied with Maria Grazia Petrali, and obtained a first-class Master’s degree at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Como, studying with Roberto Stefanoni. Afer 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, organ and fortepiano. She was also awarded a Bachelor’s degree in the Economy of the Arts, Culture and Communication at the Bocconi University in Milan.
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 has performed at numerous other festivals in Italy and further afeld in Europe – Croatia, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain and Switzerland – both as soloist and in chamber ensembles. Te conductors with whom she was worked include Riccardo Bovino, Massimo Merone, Simone Ori and Christopher Warren-Green, and her concerto appearances have featured Beethoven‘s Tird Piano Concerto, Mozart’s Concertos k449 in E fat major and k466 in D minor and Bach‘s D minor Concerto. Her numerous awards in national and international competitions, both as 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. Tis Respighi project allowed her to work closely with the leading Respighi authority, the late Potito Pedarra.
Another unusual interest is her work in developing new compositions and transcriptions for accordion and piano, resulting in a number of premieres, including works by Carlo Galante, Fergus Johnstone and Giorgio Colombo Taccani, among others.
The project attracted sponsorship from Pro Helvetia, Fondation Suisa and Swiss performers SIG during the Classical:NEXT music meeting in Rotterdam 2018. 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. Giovanna Gatto is an active piano and chamber-music teacher at the Valais Music Academy/Allgemeine Musikschule Oberwallis (AMO) in Switzerland, and is professor of piano at the Conservatorio F. Vittadini in Pavia in Italy.