Ars Alta announces the fourth Denia International Piano Festival - 19 Sept to 3 Dec 2026

 

Piano Duo Kos–Gašparović invites you to experience music at its highest level, where two exceptional artists perform with remarkable unity, virtuosity, and expressive power. Their concerts transcend the traditional recital, transforming the piano into an orchestra and every stage into a destination.

From the elegance of Beethoven to the vibrant rhythms of Spain and the evocative colours of Ravel, each program is thoughtfully crafted to inspire, captivate, and leave a lasting impression.

Whether in the world’s leading concert halls, prestigious festivals, or intimate chamber music venues, Piano Duo Kos–Gašparović offers performances that celebrate excellence, passion, and the joy of musical discovery.

Mathis Cathignol (France, 2000) is one of the most promising pianists of his generation. A graduate of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (CNSMDP), he earned Master’s degrees in both Piano Performance and Piano Accompaniment with the highest distinction. A prizewinner at numerous international competitions, he won First Prize at the Pierre Barbizet International Piano Competition (2024) and Third Prize at the Épinal International Piano Competition (2025).

As a soloist, he has performed concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Ravel, and Stravinsky with leading orchestras, and has appeared at prestigious venues and festivals including La Roque-d’Anthéron, Salle Cortot, and Nohant. Since 2022, he has been Professor of Piano at the Claude Debussy Conservatory in Paris. Praised for the elegance of his sound and the maturity of his interpretations, Mathis Cathignol is rapidly establishing himself as one of the leading young French pianists.

Principal clarinet of the Teatro alla Scala Orchestra and Philharmonic Orchestra since 1984, Fabrizio Meloni completed his musical studies at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan. He is a winner of national and international competitions and has collaborated with internationally renowned soloists such as Bruno Canino, Alexander Lonquich, Michele Campanella, Heinrich Schiff, Friederich Gulda, Editha Gruberova, the Hagen Quartet, M.W. Chung, Philip Moll, Riccardo Muti, and Daniel Baremboim (the latter in his extraordinary capacity as pianist).

He has toured the United States and Israel with the Quintetto a Fiati Italiano. With the Nuovo Quintetto Italiano ha has toured South America and South Asia.. He has been invited to give masterclasses throughout the world. 

Defined by The New York Times “an artist with supreme technical mastery, dazzling and charming with his highly cultivated sound”, Alberto Nosè is one of the most awarded piano artists of his generation. He stood out the international music world at the age of eleven winning 1st Prize at the Jugend für Mozart International Competition in Salzburg. Top prize winner of Montecarlo Piano Masters, New York Concert Artists, Paloma O’Sheain Santander, Long-Thibaud in Paris, Maj Lind in Helsinki, Busoni in Bolzano, he was laureate at the F. Chopin International Piano Competition in 2000 which led him to a worldwide career as soloist as well as with major orchestras (London Philharmonic Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonique de Radio France, Sinfonica de Madrid) in the most renowed concert venues like Carnegie Hall in New York, Southbank Centre in London, Konzerhaus in Berlin, Théâtre du Châtelet and Salle Pleyel in Paris, Auditorium in Madrid, Mozarteum in Salzburg, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, City Hall in Hong Kong, Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, La Fenice in Venice, Santa Cecilia in Rome.

His debut album for Piano Le Magazine featuring works by Brahms, Chopin, Liszt and Prokofiev won several awards like CHOC du Monde de la Musique and La Clef by ResMusica. His CD of the Keyboard Sonatas by J. Ch. Bach, recorded on modern piano and published by Naxos, has been broadcast by Radio France, BBC 3, Radio 4 Netherland, Radio New Zealand, ABC Classic FM USA and Australia.

István I. Székely is an internationally acclaimed concert pianist, pedagogue, and distinguished representative of the Franz Liszt pianistic tradition. He is Professor of Piano at the Katarina Gurska Conservatory in Madrid and at the Franz Liszt Center for High Performance Pianists in La Nucía, Spain.

He has given masterclasses in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Austria, Turkey, Israel, Colombia, and Spain, and is regularly invited to serve on the juries of prestigious international piano competitions. As a concert pianist, he has performed throughout Spain, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Greece, Russia, Turkey, the United States, and Colombia, and has had the honor of giving a private recital for Her Royal Highness Princess Chulabhorn Mahidol of Thailand.

He is the Founder and Artistic Director of the Dénia International Piano Festival, the Alicante International Piano Competition, and the Franz Liszt Center Piano Competition, as well as the Founder and Music Director of the Sombor Philharmonic. His artistic and pedagogical career reflects a lifelong commitment to musical excellence and the preservation of the great European piano tradition.

Programme and booking details are at https://www.arsaltacultural.com/eng/ and https://www.arsaltacultural.com/

This Side Of Paradise is a very famous novel and justly so. Its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, has been something of a blind spot for me. I read The Great Gatsby as a teenager and, frankly, was disappointed. The reaction says more about me and my age than about the book. But that was many years ago and perhaps I should revisit it.

But This Side Of Paradise was the author’s first novel and first success. It did take him many years and much revision to complete and, frankly, it shows. The style, point of view and indeed characterisation is, for me, inconsistent throughout. And what is more the mixture of forms – narrative, description and poetry, also for me, seems to flow from the writer’s need to impress and explore rather than any desire to communicate. At the same time, it feels like the writer also does not want to experiment.

Amory Blaine, the principal character, is a Midwesterner who finds himself in a private school and then Princeton. At the outset, he appears to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth as he sets about building career, love, family, and future. But life does not work out that way for him. He is repeatedly unlucky in love, finding that the women he falls for have better, far more lucrative options. His fortune, apparently considerable at the start, dwindles, until at the end of the book he is a poor man, but returning to Princeton, no doubt to pursue the academe that he had earlier apparently turned his back on.

Amory Blaine does spend time in the trenches in World War I, but he is decidedly reticent about the experience. We have no clues as to whether this is born of trauma or indifference. Perhaps the author, himself, had no direct resource to rely on since his own time in the military was spent within the USA. At the end of the novel, amid disagreements about politics, he does mention one acquaintance who was killed in the fighting, but the loss of life in the trenches, and also from the influenza epidemic that followed apparently past him by or perhaps left no lasting impression. One feels that the events that cause Amory Blaine to rethink his life and pursue different directions were precisely those that beset the writer himself.

In the first half of the book, I felt a little frustrated about the characters, who seemed to have no depth. In effect, they all seem to live in an eternal present, hardly ever referring to their collective past or harbouring ambitions or fears about the future. What emerges is a desire to conform to the ideals of the social class that they imagine they adhere to, more specifically the social class to which they aspire. If they are successful in forming facilitating liaisons, that class identity is reinforced, if not, it is questioned. Amory increasingly finds himself in the latter position, leading him inexorably towards socialism. One feels that he would not have espoused these views if he had married money, as he originally set out to do.

Amory Blaine and several of his acquaintances are heavily into literature and regularly quote and write poetry, but the efforts are late nineteenth century in style. There is no obvious modernism here. They, and the writer, are drawn towards epithets which, though in context impress, seems overdone, overwritten. Here are just two examples. Wandering through a storm one day, Amory asks himself: ‘“Who the devil is there in Ramilly County,” muttered Amory aloud, “who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?”’ Soon after a character muses: ‘Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April.’

By the end of the book, Amory declares himself a socialist, but his radicalism is couched in democratic terms, not in revolutionary and his position seems to be born of rejection by the social class he once aspired to, rather than a plea for justice in human relations. But This Side Of Paradise remains a masterpiece of its kind, a towering achievement of a young writer and is well worth reading.