Active as a pianist, conductor, and composer, Gianluca Cascioli has championed 20th century and contemporary music, including his own. He has also recorded mainstream repertory, mostly for the Deutsche Grammophon label. Cascioli was born on July 17, 1979, in Turin, Italy. He attended the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory there, studying composition with Alessandro Ruo Rui and Alberto Colla and piano with Franco Scala. A major break came in 1994 when Cascioli won the Umberto Micheli International Piano Competition in Milan. Part of his prize was a contract with Deutsche Grammophon, and he began his recording career in 1997 with an album of works by Beethoven, Webern, Schoenberg, Ligeti, and Boulez. He recorded several more albums for Deutsche Grammophon, including an all-Beethoven disc and a group of his own cello works with cellist Enrico Bronzi. Cascioli has appeared as a piano soloist with some of the world's top orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, and Chicago Symphony. As a conductor, he has led the Deutsche Kammerorchester Frankfurt, and a number of his compositions have been played in European venues, including his Sonatina (2004), played at the Hamburg Musikfest, a symphony, a violin-and-piano sonata, and a set of variations for piano. An enthusiastic chamber music player, Cascioli numbers various prestigious musicians among his collaborators, such as cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, violinist Yuri Bashmet, and clarinetist Sabine Meyer. In 2010, Cascioli joined violinist Sayaka Shoji for a recording of Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 12, and Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op. 47 ("Kreutzer). In 2021, he returned to the recording studio on the Harmonia Mundi label, performing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, Op. 58, and what was termed the Piano Concerto No. 6, Op. 61a, Beethoven's transcription of his Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, for piano and orchestra. ~ James Manheim, Rovi