| Sunday, June 10, 2007
THE RECORDING OF THE ETUDES WAS AWARDED 5 STARS BY MUSICA, SUONARE NEWS AND CLASSIC VOICE
"The first recording in a complete works of Chopin series that we can count on. After all, De Maria has shown an uncommonly rich romantic personality: precise in his reading and brilliant in his performance, which runs a gamut of inspiration that is not eccentric, but essential. De Maria meets the challenge of the Etudes with amazing assurance, in the identification of their poetic models, and in his ability to respect the formal references (we can see this in the toccata-like Etudes, so sharp and rendered in the traditional style, yet diversified through touch and color) as well as in the search for the most convincing musical reasons for the continuous changes of color and for the dialectic among the individual pieces of the two works: for example, the contrast between the sixth and the seventh Etudes of op. 25.
But the whole interpretation stands out for the freshness of manner, the sparkle of the ideas, as well as for the facility of the technique." Angelo Foletto, Suonare News.
"De Maria is a serious minded and very capable pianist of the school of Gino Gorini (a wonderful and unjustly forgotten soloist) and of that of Maria Tipo; his career has been built up with patience and tenacity (he won first prize in the Dino Ciani Competition in 1990) without unnecessary protagonism and with consistently admirable results. Therefore it gives us a somewhat chauvinistic pleasure to see his picture on a cd with the Decca label, where, a few years ago, only pictures of Ashkenazy or Jorge Bolet could be seen, as if to show that there are Italian artists who are able to get ahead. demonstrating their qualities on the job. And it was precisely on the job that we heard De Maria play the Etudes op. 10 and part of op. 25 a few years ago and we admired his musical qualities and his technique. Even then, certain personal choices as well as the very attentive accentuation of certain aspects in the reading of these classics were evident (for example in nn. 1, 7, 8, 9 of op. 10 in nn. 4 and 8 of op. 25 and in the three posthumous etudes, interpreted with rare ability). If, on one hand they deprive us of Pollini’s rigid precision, almost like that of a metronome, on the other, they allow us to hear details which usually escape one’s attention. A very interesting record, then, which we hope will reserve De Maria wider international recognition." Luca Chierici, Classic Voice.