The Bagni di Lucca Art Festival has brought into our wee beautiful town some of the most amazing international talent that it has seen for many years. Bagni di Lucca is known for its many famous personages. It is known for all the incredible writers and musicians and visual artists that have come here through history, seduced by its unspoilt beauty, resting and walking in the deep greens and aquas of the verdant mountains rolling over each other, mystical visions of villages perching on the hilly spines, torrents racing coldly through ravines and crevices emerging into still ponds where children play, leaping onwards and down into the river Lima, through the great devil’s bridge of Ponte di Maddalena and into the Serchio before reaching Lucca.
The Bagni di Lucca Art Festival has brought together today’s wonderful artists. A couple of weeks ago we had two concerts in consecutive nights in the old casino in Ponte a Serraglio. Both concerts blew us away. The first concert was by Ronald Farren-Price playing piano.
Ronald Farren-Price, a virtuoso and one of Australia’s foremost concert pianists, now retired from concert life at eighty something, is an inspiration of daunting precocity. An artist of meticulous self discipline, he has practiced every day for 78 years and sometimes on programs he will never play professionally.
“When students ask me why I’m working on a big program that I may never even perform, I say that I am working on it for the next world, and that nothing in life is lost. Eventually everything has a meaning.”
He himself believes in the interpretation of the music rather than the technical brilliance of the performance. He believes in memorising his pieces in preparation before a performance for the inner ear and the mind so that that the only thing he has to do when performing is to interpret the knowledge.
“I always tell my students to strive for something that is beautiful rather than something only brilliant. Brilliance alone can lead to something blatant in no time if one is not careful.”
His body, bent permanently in its accustomed posture at the piano, reminded me of what it was to be a great artist, a vocation of intense pursuit, undistracted by the frills of life and desires for luxury, just the wish for all needs met. This night he arrived in the old casino where Liszt played over a hundred years ago at its opening ceremonies, the beautiful old chandeliers glistening in the gilt age marked mirrors, the piano raised on a stage, the chairs fanning out around it, people eager in their seats. Gentle gentle his hands barely lifted off the keys as he opened his performance with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. So tender his face, his eyes softly closed like a child’s, as though he was just feeling the music as it left the tips of his fingers, so exquisitely almost silent those opening notes that broke away the day and placed our minds in open readiness. It was a truly amazing performance. It was the performance of a master. It was an hour and a half of music laced with passion and tenderness, a meditation so perfectly controlled, yet so ‘felt’, so perfectly in harmony with the essence of every note. I rave, but I loved it. So did we all. We clapped so hard we ached.
I am inspired for my own life as an artist. Ronald Farren-Price gave us everything that night. I am inspired by a man who, though frail and vulnerable in his advancing age, has not allowed frailty and a hurting body to interfere with his spiritual connection to his creativity. His will to control the extremities of body to allow himself to ‘speak’ was really something to be seen and heard.
He was always revered, being one of those children with incredible talent that eventually took his studies to London and New York, feted and lauded wherever he went and here today. Most of his professional life has been cocooned in the Music Faculty of the University of Melbourne with concert forays each year into some of the most amazing concert halls of the world. How incredibly lucky were we to have seen this, his last public performance. He promises to return next year with a master class of gifted students who in turn will take the stage to create another night for the soul to remember.
Living Tuscany & Provence 
I love your description of the event – very poetical.
Thank you Francis! Easy to be a poet at such an event!!
Thank you for sharing a first-hand review of what sounds like a wonderful festival!
It has been a great festival with more wonderful events to come. It’s a pleasure to share it!