Directed by the pianist Maurizio Baglini and supported by the Bertarelli Foundation, the Amiata Piano Festival is one of the most prestigious musical events on the international scene. During thirteen editions it has hosted more than three hundred interpreters and counts over one hundred concerts transmitted by Rai’s radio broadcast.
The project was born in 2005 in a basement of Castel del Piano from a visionary intuition of Maurizio Baglini: bring classical music in an uncontaminated and culturally virgin place, that of the slopes of Mount Amiata, in the area of the Grosseto Maremma. Immediately is sought a contact with a winery, the Collemassari Spa, which has the same ambitions: let the quality
of a new docg, the Montecucco, to grow, to bring it to the level of great wines such as the Brunello of Montalcino. The meeting between music and wine is summarised in the encounter of Maurizio Baglini and Claudio Tipa, Collemassari managing director, who has been hosting two concerts, since the first edition, in his own suggestive wine cellar.
The content prerogative is based on the originality of the proposal: no existing circuit concert, but projects that Maurizio Baglini and the cellist Silvia Chiesa, his life partner and resident artist in the Amiata Piano Festival, conceive specifically, every year, for the event, strong of the relationships and experiences acquired in their international tours.
The audience comes from all over the world – Europe, but also the United States, Japan, Australia – attracted by the strong appeal of a splendid area of Tuscany, not yet inflated by mass tourism. The project acquires such a strength that Claudio Tipa, with his family - his wife Maria Tipa and his sister Maria Iris Bertarelli – decides to set up a Foundation, the Bertarelli Foundation indeed, apt to develop the socio-cultural structure of the whole territory of Montecucco.
Thanks to the increasing success of the public and critics, since 2015 the Festival has been provided with an auditorium built ad hoc on a hill surrounded by olive groves and vineyards: the Bertarelli Forum. Designed with zero environmental impact and characterised by perfect acoustics, the new location makes even more ambitious and significant musical projects possible, ranging from symphonic literature to crossovers.
Therefore, from a mere musical project arose a huge entrepreneurial one. Son of the artistic vision of Maurizio Baglini and Silvia Chiesa, the Amiata Piano Festival represents a unique case in Italy of a private cultural enterprise: a formidable synergy between music, wine production, architecture and tourism at the highest levels.
