Franco Buitoni Award Given to Pianist Filippo Gorini

The Borletti-Buitoni Trust will honor the 27-year-old pianist with the award of £25,000

The Borletti-Buitoni Trust's founder Ilaria Borletti Buitoni created the prize as a tribute to her late husband Franco Buitoni, co-founder of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust. Given every other year, the award of £25,000 recognizes Italian musicians who promote and encourage chamber music at home and throughout the world.

This year's prize went to pianist Filippo Gorini for his Sonata for 7 Cities project which will be launched in 2025. The project will see Gorini spend a month in seven cities around the world. Each residency will feature a recital and concerto performance with the city’s symphony orchestra at the beginning and end of the month-long period. In between performances, he will be focused on creating local partnerships for educational, mentoring, and philanthropic activity — as well as play in more unusual venues beyond the city center for audiences who are not regular concert-goers.

"The idea is simple: instead of constantly traveling from one concert venue to another, I want to focus on each city for a full month and offer as much as I can to the local community in that time, with the aim of leaving a deeper impression than would be possible with a single performance," Gorini writes. "I hope to build ongoing relationships and create a new way of developing my career for the long term future in this way with many more cities around the world.

"I very much admire Filippo’s very generous commitment to sharing his great musical talent and insight with a much wider community, especially those who are often unable to attend major concerts through lack of such things as money, confidence, education and ability," said Ilaria Borletti Buitoni. "This is very much in keeping with our BBT Communities initiative launched in 2019 to support charities around the world that help underprivileged people of all ages and backgrounds through music. I wish Filippo every success with this philanthropic initiative, which I am sure, will be a very rewarding experience for him and for everybody involved."

The Award will be officially presented by Borletti Buitoni at a special concert in association with Società del Quartetto in Milan on June 22.

Filippo Gorini was awarded one of the most prestigious musical recognitions in Italy, the "Premio Abbiati.” The former First Prize at the Telekom-Beethoven Competition 2015, he has performed on stages such as the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Berlin Konzerthaus, Vienna Konzerthaus, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, and London's Wigmore Hall, to name a few.