Vanessa Benelli Mosell

www.vanessabenellimosell.com

 

Biography

As a pianist and as a conductor, Vanessa Benelli Mosell unites a rich and stimulating diversity of musical and cultural threads. Trained in her native Italy, Russia, the UK and France, she shapes her repertoire and career with distinctive passion, conviction and intellectual curiosity. In her development as an artist she has drawn on the wisdom such mentors as Dmitri Alexeev, Daniel Harding, Mikko Franck, Cristian Mãcelaru, George Benjamin and the late Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose conception of sound proved revelatory to her as a pianist.
 
The works of contemporary composers comprise a significant strand in her career. Her performances of Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke attracted the attention of the composer, who invited her to study with him, citing her “power to let people appreciate my music”. Vanessa Benelli Mosell has since collaborated with a number of leading contemporary composers, such as George Benjamin, Olga Neuwirth, Hugues Dufourt, Claire-Melanie Sinnhuber, Stefano Gervasoni, Martin Matalon and Marco Stroppa.
 
In a characteristically illuminating move, Vanessa Benelli Mosell paired Stockhausen with Scriabin on Light, a 2016 album of piano music released by DECCA Classics; “Powerful, emotional, romantic and dramatic,” wrote the Guardian, “she sweeps us along in a dazzling display of assured technique.” Gramophone had previously observed that “Stockhausen’s spirit must be smiling upon the pianist’s utmost precision in regard to dynamic scaling and rhythm.” Her eight DECCA releases also embrace works by Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Philip Glass, Karol Beffa, and, on Casta diva – a collection of operatic transcriptions – Liszt’s reimagining for piano of music by Verdi, Rossini and Bellini.
In 2023, she will appear as a recitalist in Palermo, Florence and Las Palmas, as a chamber player in Macerata with cellist Jing Zhao and in Chieti with the Kyiv Virtuosi, and as a soloist in Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto in Liechtenstein.
Among the highlights of her recent schedule as a pianist are: her debuts at La Scala, Milan and Turin’s Teatro Regio; solo recitals at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam and at the Seoul Arts Center; portrait concerts at the National Concert Hall, Dublin for RTÉ, and at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts; engagements in Paris at the Salle Gaveau and Auditorium de Radio France, in Spain at Madrid’s Auditorio Nacional de Música and Barcelona’s Palau de la Musica Catalana, and in the UK at Wigmore Hall in London, the Usher Hall in Edinburgh and the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow.
 
Vanessa Benelli Mosell’s performances in past seasons have included George Benjamin’s Piano Concerto ‘Duet’, with the composer himself conducting the Orchestre National de France at Radio France’s Présences Festival in Paris; she had previously given the Irish premiere of ‘Duet’ with the RTE Concert Orchestra and Jonathan Bloxham. In France, she has also played Olga Neuwirth’s Piano Concerto ‘Locus … doublure … solus’ with the Orchestre National de Lyon and Ilan Volkov, and has appeared with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under its’ Music Director Mikko Franck, with the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse and conductor Felix Mildenberger, and at the Paris Philharmonie and Grame Lyon. In the UK she has played concertos with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Kirill Karabits, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Beyond Europe, her dates have included concertos with the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar de Venezuela and conductor Diego Matheuz, and at the Al Bustan Festival in Lebanon.
 
As a chamber musician she has collaborated with violinists Renaud Capuçon, Daishin Kashimoto, Massimo Quarta, Julian Rachlin and Vadim Repin, pianist Bertrand Chamayou, mandolin-player Julien Martineau, horn-player Radovan Vlatković, and cellists Gautier Capuçon, Alexander Chauchian, Henri Demarquette, (her partner for the DECCA album Echoes, comprising works by Glass and Rachmaninov), and Alexander Knyazev.
 
Born in Tuscany, Vanessa Benelli Mosell began studying music at the age of three and was admitted four years later to the renowned International Piano Academy in Imola. She made her concerto debut aged nine and her New York debut at the age of 11, when the distinguished pianist Pascal Rogé described her as “the most natural musical talent I have encountered in my entire life”. In 2007 she entered the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where her professor was Mikhail Voskresensky, before continuing her studies with Dmitri Alexeev at London’s Royal College of Music, graduating with a master’s degree in 2012.