Agnese Toniutti

Pianist Agnese Toniutti specializes in contemporary music that includes extended technique, improvisation, and novel approaches to sound. Her recitals often blend music and spoken text, and she is also a researcher who has published several articles. Toniutti studied piano with Giorgio Lovato at the Conservatory of Venice and graduated after writing a thesis on Giacinto Scelsi. She also took chamber music classes and participated in master classes with pianist François-Joël Thiollier, Massimiliano Damerini, and Lya de Barberiis, among others. In 2009, she performed in the project Hommage à John, dedicated to the memory of John Cage, and she appeared in the 2015 project Environmental Dialogue, directed by Pauline Oliveros in Venice, and later in its broadcast on Wave Farm Radio in New York. Toniutti has specialized in Scelsi's music; in 2010, she performed "Around Scelsi," a concert and research presentation on Scelsi and his musical environment. She has lectured widely on Scelsi and was the music director of the festival Scelsiana 2014, which also included master classes from performers and teachers, who had worked closely with the composer. In 2019, Toniutti toured the U.S., giving lecture-recitals on Scelsi's music. In 2020, she made her debut recording on the Da Vinci Classics label with Lento trascolorare - piano music, an album devoted to music by Giancarlo Cardini. Toniutti's recitals generally cover a single composer or theme and weave live performance with audio documents and excerpts from writings. They have been devoted to such topics as Scelsi, Cage, Cardini, the Fluxus movement, and women's creativity from the 1950s to the present day. The latter includes music by composer Lucia Dlugoszewski, about whom Toniutti wrote a PhD thesis. Toniutti has published several papers dealing with notation and improvisation, and she participated in the 2020 American Musicological Society conference panel. She returned on recordings with several releases on the Neuma label, including Subtle Matters, devoted to Dlugoszewski (2021), and John Cage: Sonatas & Interludes (2023).
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