Diego Minciacchi

Composer and neurologist Diego Minciacchi is as likely to publish a paper on motor skills as he is to compose music that mixes scientific and poetic ideas; yet this fact should not intimidate listeners new to his work, who might worry that the compositions on this 2005 release from Col Legno are too cerebral or complicated to appreciate. What they should know upfront, however, is that Minciacchi is a product of the generation of composers who absorbed the lessons of the 1960s and '70s avant-garde in their formative years, but instead of turning to neo-Romanticism, minimalism, or eclecticism in the 1990s, pushed the experimental envelope even further. Minciacchi studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Horatiu Radulescu, among other teachers, and much of their hardcore modernist influence is apparent in this collection of piano works, composed between 1979 and 2003. Indeed, the use of the term Klavierstück seems intended to invoke the spirit of Stockhausen, rather more than Liszt or Schumann.