The Luxembourg-based composer and piano player Francesco Tristano belongs to the small cohort of musicians who don’t separate the music into “academic” and “popular,” and is well known both to the adherents of the classical music and the connoisseurs of contemporary electronica. This graduate of New York’s famous Juilliard School has performed at Carnegie Hall, the Wiener Musikverein and the Royal Concertgebouw at Amsterdam, has toured with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and the Russian National Orchestra, has recorded Bach and Buxtehude, Ravel and Prokofiev, Cage and Berio, and has released his albums at the Deutsche Grammophon and Sony Classics – meaning that at the age of 36, he has built a remarkable career in the world of classical music, demonstrating his unorthodox taste and the knowledge of 20th century music.

Contemporary electronica also appeals to Francesco Tristano: he has collaborated with the fathers of Detroit techno Jeff Mills, Derrick May, and Carl Craig. In his own compositions, he’s constantly searching for the furmula that would unite the treasures of the classical music literature with the timbral capacities of synthesizers and computer software, while making the musical language of Baroque and 20th century avant-garde comprehensible to the fans of deep house and techno.

Francesco Tristano was born in 1981, and began his study of piano at the age of five. His interest in club music and electronica was awakened when he lived in New York, studying at the prestigious Juilliard School with the famous American piano player Rosalyn Tureck. Since then, this composer, producer and piano player with specialization in Baroque and 20th century music has pursued all of his interests in equal measure, successfully blending them in his numerous projects.

Tristano has recorded more than a dozen albums, including the full collection of Baroque composer Girolamo Frescobaldi’s toccatas, the piano compositions of Luciano Berio, and his own experiments in crossbreeding acoustic and electronic sounds. He has arranged orchestra interpretations of the classical anthems of Detroit techno, and produced the audiovisual show about architecture of the future set to the Goldberg Variations of Johann Sebastian Bach. Tristano has travelled all over the world – from the United States to Japan – as a soloist and along with the illustrious symphonic orchestras.

At SOUND UP’s event in Moscow Francesco Tristano will perform two diverse programs.

The first concert will be devoted to the acoustic sound, as he will perform the Baroque rarities of Jan Sweelinck and Girolamo Frescobaldi, Maurice Ravel’s Impressionist Gaspard de la nuit, and his own compositions from the latest, piano-only album Piano Circle Songs.

At the second concert, the Second French Suite of Johann Sebastian Bach will be contrasted with the Luxembourg native’s own compositions, in which he demonstrates the whole range of grand piano’s possible combinations with electronica, from the subtle stylizations of Baroque to his favorite “acid classics.”