Fabio Bidini

Pianist Fabio Bidini is an unusually versatile pianist with a repertoire of more than 80 concertos and a sympathetic way with music from the Baroque to the present day. He is also a noted educator who has been active in both Europe and the U.S. Bidini was born in Arezzo, Italy, on June 11, 1968. When he was four, he began to play with a broken electric keyboard his father had brought home, and his family noticed that he could reproduce commercial jingles that he heard on the radio. They asked an engineer and amateur pianist who lived in their apartment building whether Bidini was talented, and the engineer, Luigi Oliviero, replied in the affirmative and gave Bidini his first lessons. By the following year, he was already performing in public. Bidini studied with Orazio Frugoni and Maria Tipo, and he won 11 Italian piano competitions, notably often winning the audience prize as well. He began to win competitions internationally, in London, Pretoria, and Cologne, among other cities, and at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Texas in 1993, he was a finalist. That launched Bidini on an international career that has included appearances at the Rudolfinum in Prague, New York's Carnegie Hall, the Royal Festival Hall in London. Among the conductors with whom he has performed are JoAnn Falletta, Dmitri Sitkovetsky, and Michael Tilson Thomas. Bidini is in demand as a chamber music player and has collaborated with the American String Quartet, the Brodsky Quartet, and violinist Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker, often performing with the latter in a duo. He has been a frequent guest at European festivals, mostly in Italy and France. Bidini has recorded for Delos, Naxos, Encore Performance, and other labels. In 2019, he recorded the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 83, with Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Bidini has been especially influential as a teacher, first at the Universität der Künste in Berlin, and then, since 2015, at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. He also teaches at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln in Germany. ~ James Manheim