Biography (read more)
Sergio Fiorentino was born in Naples on 22 December 1927 and trained at the San Pietro a Majella conservatory under Finizio and Denza, with a Salzburg masterclass under Carlo Zecchi. A competition win at Monza in 1947 — Michelangeli chairing the jury — opened a career that a 1954 air crash injury interrupted; he withdrew into teaching for decades, re-emerging in the 1990s for a late flowering cut short by his death in Naples on 22 August 1998.
Fiorentino is the connoisseurs’ rediscovery of the late twentieth century: tapes and late-career recordings revealed a virtuoso of golden-age freedom and effortless mechanism, above all in Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. His readings entered this catalogue with the aura of legend, and hearing them against the studio mainstream shows exactly why the legend formed.
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