LA Times Music Critic Mark Swed described Formenti as "phenomenal", 
"extraordinary", "riveting", "unique", "demanding", "brilliant", 
"venturesome", "volatile", "passionate", "modernist", 
"venturesome","ferocious percussive intensity", "otherworldly 
lyricism","haunting",  "ecstatic", "dramatic fervor", "mesmeric", 
"shamanistic", "unforgettable"." Every note was like a shimmering star in a 
clear, beautiful night sky".

LA Times Reporter Diane Haithman in her interview noted that one of the music 
pieces requires two pianos:set at right angles, played at the same time, one 
with each hand.  One tuned in the standard way, the other with each key 
"de-tuned" downward a quarter-tone.

Haithman observed that in one LACMA concert, Formenti played Jean Barraque's 
45-minute Sonata in 23 minutes. In 2001, he shaved another minute off his 
personal best.

The Orange County Register's Timothy Mangan has called Formenti "a compelling 
performer who grabs you by both shoulders and shakes,"... And, in LA Weekly, 
Alan Rich confessed himself to be still "obsessed with the memories" of the 
LACMA concerts more than a year after the event.

Ernest Fleischmann, artistic director of the Ojai Festival, "I was really 
struck by the guy's fearlessness and personality; he seemed to be able to 
play the most complicated and strange new music and have no problems with it,"

Times music critic Mark Swed placed Formenti--"wildly entertaining and 
technically astonishing"--on his Top 10 list for last year.
===================================================
Music Review
IT'S THE WERY LATEST IN OJAI FROM IMPASSIONED PIANIST FORMENTI

Los Angeles Times
By Mark Swed
May 31 2002

The Ojai Music Festival this year is concerned with "last and latest 
thoughts."... Marino Formenti, the phenomenal Italian pianist, tackles recent 
music in a recital for kids Saturday morning and one for adults in the 
afternoon.

But to begin it all, Formenti performed a four-hour marathon Wednesday 
night... Probably this extraordinary pianist didn't intend to turn the theme 
of the festival into an oxymoron, but that is what he did, in a riveting, 
unique event.

For Formenti, "last and latest" might as well be one and the same. Everything 
he plays seems like latest thoughts, namely his own. Formenti surely must 
have prepared long and hard for this incredibly demanding and brilliantly 
executed program, but it all sounded as though he were making it up on the 
spot. Formenti has become a familiar, if ever astonishing, figure in Southern 
California over the past few years. The Vienna-based pianist, who is a member 
of the new-music group Klangforum Wien, has offered venturesome one-man 
festivals at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and has given recitals in 
Orange County and Cerritos. He is a volatile, passionate modernist who can 
bring a sense of theater to even the most complex, knotty modern music.

He holds audiences in thrall with his ferocious percussive intensity at one 
extreme and his otherworldly lyricism at the other.

On Wednesday, Formenti took on two 19th century masterpieces--Beethoven's 
Bagatelles, Opus 126, and Schubert's Sonata in B flat, D. 960.

Beethoven's last work for piano consists of six miniatures, each an exercise 
in condensation. With time running out for Beethoven, he made each phrase an 
essential expression and left us to fill in the gaps. Syphilitic Schubert 
wrote his transcendental B-Flat Sonata the last year of his short life, but 
it is music in no hurry. Rather, the sonata is an uncompromising study in the 
unfolding of the long, lyric line.

Formenti played both works in what appeared to be a state of wonder. His 
Beethoven raged with fury one moment and seemed lighter than air the next. In 
the Schubert, the pianist lingered on the haunting dark ringing of the low 
trills in the first movement and then lifted the black mood with a lyricism 
that bordered on the ecstatic.

For the Terezin works--excerpts from Pavel Haas' Suite, Opus 13, Viktor 
Ullmann's Sonata No. 6 and Gideon Klein's Sonata, Opus 49--Formenti had 
little opportunity to exploit his lyric gifts. This is mainly busy, 
Expressionist music. But what Formenti did is bring dramatic fervor to this 
often gray music. There was nothing maudlin or exploitative here, as there 
can be in performances of these composers, just exciting playing, and, in the 
case of Haas, a feeling that here was one composer who might have been able 
to carry on where Janacek left off.

The marathon's concluding performance, Feldman's "For Bunita Marcus," was an 
event all by itself. Written in 1985, two years before the composer's death 
and not his last work for piano, it nevertheless has the feel of music that 
has transcended the physical realm altogether. For the 76-minute performance, 
which went on past midnight, many of the chairs were replaced by cushions and 
futons around the piano. Lights were kept dim. The music is very soft (rarely 
rising above the dynamic of piano) and exceptionally minimal even for 
Feldman. Much of it is single notes loosely strung together. About every 10 
minutes comes a chord.

Formenti's performance was mesmeric, shamanistic, unforgettable. He was, I'm 
fairly certain, quieter and more still than any other pianist who has tackled 
this work (there are two recordings of it, and only a handful of other 
pianists have played it). But what was most striking about the performance 
was its beauty of tone. Every note was like a shimmering star in a clear, 
beautiful night sky. That sense of lyrical wonder that Formenti made 
momentary in Beethoven and Schubert came to seem permanent here. Time 
stopped, last and latest merged into one....

*
The Ojai Music Festival continues through Sunday, $15-$55, Libbey Bowl, Ojai 
Avenue at Signal Street, Ojai, (805) 646-2053. 

==================================================

FINGERS ON THE PULSE
Pianist Marino Formenti pours himself into today's music

Los Angeles Times
By Dianne Haithman 
May 28 2002

By the time pianist Marino Formenti sits down to play, his Steinway must be 
perfectly out of tune.

Formenti, 36, spent a recent morning at Fields Pianos in West Los Angeles, 
selecting the Steinways the dealer will lend to him for his upcoming 
performances at the 2002 Ojai Music Festival. One piece in his eclectic 
program, "Hommage a Ligeti" by Georg Friedrich Haas, requires two pianos: one 
tuned in the standard way, the other with each key "de-tuned" downward a 
quarter-tone.

He will play both pianos, set at right angles, at the same time, one with 
each hand. The piano will require several tuning sessions before it is 
transferred to Ojai for the five-day festival, which begins Wednesday. The 
instrument must acclimate to this bizarre treatment in stages in order to 
hold on to the strange new tones.

"When you play them together, it makes beautiful colors, very new colors; 
it's like the invention of new colors by a painter, if you can imagine," 
Formenti says excitedly--which is how he says everything. "Shimmering--do you 
say shimmering?"

Formenti, an Italian pianist who makes his home in Vienna, is not always sure 
of the English word for what's on his mind, but he knows his preferences in 
music--and in pianos.

Music: contemporary. "To ask a pianist why he plays the music of today is to 
ask a painter why he paints abstract paintings rather than flowers, or 
Madonnas," he observes. "I am an artist living now, I do things of now, in 
the language of now."

Pianos: a much more personal issue. "That question is as difficult to answer 
as: 'How do you choose your lovers?'--each piano is very distinctive," 
Formenti muses. He adds that he prefers choosing pianos to selecting lovers; 
less risk of rejection. "I choose. It is much better," he says playfully.

Food, he's less picky about. Thai, Indian, anything will do as long as it's 
nearby--because he's coming back to the piano store to do some more work 
after lunch. Formenti works all the time. "I am a workaholic, I can't really 
enjoy doing nothing," Formenti admits, over Indian food. He would like to 
acquire this skill. "Doing nothing is a way to relax, and I am always on the 
edge. I live very much on the edge."

Perhaps it is Formenti's perpetual proximity to the edge of workaholism ("I 
was a very nervous child") that has placed him on the cusp of major critical 
acclaim--and has resulted in his invitation to perform in Ojai, his first 
appearance with the festival, in three diverse programs of music ranging from 
Beethoven to 21st century piano compositions, including the world premiere of 
a new work by Hanspeter Kyburz.

The theme of the 56th annual Ojai Festival, which includes educational 
seminars and also features the Emerson String Quartet, singer Ute Lemper and 
guitarist Eliot Fisk, is "Last and Latest Thoughts." For late, great 
composers, this means works from among their last compositions; for the 
living ones, selections from their most recent works.

On Wednesday, Formenti makes his Ojai debut in the festival's first marathon 
concert, a 6 p.m. to midnight event featuring both the last and the latest, 
including works by the winners of the festival's Young Composers' Awards.

The festival, whose main venue is Ojai's outdoor Libbey Bowl, also represents 
Formenti's first time playing outdoors, where the elements will make it even 
more difficult to keep the Steinway out of tune.

Formenti's first solo appearance in Los Angeles, in a series of four concerts 
of 20th century music at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April 2000, 
inspired Times music critic Mark Swed to place Formenti--"wildly entertaining 
and technically astonishing"--on his Top 10 list for that year.

Swed has also noted this Olympic detail: In one LACMA concert, Formenti 
played Jean Barraque's 45-minute Sonata in 23 minutes. In 2001, he shaved 
another minute off his personal best.

The Orange County Register's Timothy Mangan has called Formenti "a compelling 
performer who grabs you by both shoulders and shakes," adding that Formenti's 
challenging style is not one to enjoy with "a leisurely brunch." And, in LA 
Weekly, Alan Rich confessed himself to be still "obsessed with the memories" 
of the LACMA concerts more than a year after the event.

Ernest Fleischmann, artistic director of the Ojai Festival, first encountered 
Formenti several years ago when the pianist was performing as a member of 
Klangforum Wien, one of the top contemporary-music ensembles in Europe.

"I was really struck by the guy's fearlessness and personality; he seemed to 
be able to play the most complicated and strange new music and have no 
problems with it," Fleischmann says.

"Then I heard him at one of the famous concerts at LACMA, and I thought: 
'Where has this guy been all my life?'"

Fleischmann noted that one of the pieces Formenti will perform, Alvin 
Lucier's "Nothing Is Real (Strawberry Fields Forever)," requires that a 
teapot be placed inside the piano. "And the one that requires two pianos will 
be wonderfully weird," Fleischmann adds. "He's the perfect artist for Ojai.

"But he doesn't just want to be known as an amazing performer of new 
music--so I said, 'OK, show us,'" Fleischmann adds. "So at Ojai, he will be 
playing the Schubert Sonata in B flat, one of the great works of 19th century 
piano literature, and music from the composers of Terezin concentration camp, 
which hardly anybody plays, and are really fabulous."

While preparing to play dueling pianos at Ojai, Formenti was also doing 
double duty as assistant conductor to principal conductor Kent Nagano for Los 
Angeles Opera's production of Puccini's "Turandot."

The opera, left unfinished at the composer's death in 1924, now has a new 
finale by Italian composer Luciano Berio (Formenti also will perform the 
world premiere of Berio's "Sonata 2001" at Ojai).

The assistant conductor's job is a behind-the-scenes gig that required 
Formenti to accompany the singers in rehearsal in lieu of the full orchestra.

Formenti, who admits to craving the spotlight, has a reason for being willing 
to perform in this capacity: He really wants to conduct. Opera, that is. 
"Many people have asked me why I am doing this; it is because I am not as 
advanced in experience as I am as a pianist," he says. "To me, to work with 
Kent Nagano is a gift.

"I made my [conducting] debut in Gidon Kremer's Lockenhaus [chamber music 
festival] in Austria six years ago, and he asked me to accompany a violin 
concerto, and it was so much fun, I said, 'OK, this is going to be my next 
goal.' And I love opera."

"There is also this idea of being a leader of a group of people who have the 
same goal," he adds. "I don't see it as the rule of a Fuhrer; if you do it 
the right way, you feel the energy of everyone."

And, despite his intimate relationship with the Steinways he chooses, 
Formenti admits that sometimes being alone with a piano is just not enough.

"When you are a musician, you have a very direct contact with the sound. This 
is also a very sensual, spiritual experience," he says. "But when you are a 
piano player, you are not with anyone until you get to the stage--that's why 
we love the stage."

He laughs. "When you conduct, there is communication with other people."
*
Ojai Music Festival, Wednesday-June 2, Ojai. Tickets $7.50-$55. (805) 
646-2053 or www.ojaifestival.org.