Renzo Vitale
Renzo Vitale
The Sacred Dialogue of Performance
When you go to see Renzo Vitale perform, he takes you on a personal journey that will overwhelm your senses. There is the past, the present, and the future all in one. The music holds everything at once.
There are many ways to approach this conversation. He is, after all, not only a pianist, but a composer, sound designer, acoustic engineer, artist, TED speaker, and the Creative Director of Sound at BMW Group, where he has pioneered an approach he calls Sound Genetics, shaping the future sound of electric mobility alongside Hans Zimmer. Yet for the purpose of this interview, I wanted to focus on something more intimate: Renzo Vitale as a pianist and performer. After witnessing him perform live La Quinta Stagione in Vienna, it became impossible not to.
The dualities are everywhere in him: science and art, classical and electronic, the technical and the deeply human. But the core, always, is the music itself and his dedication to touching emotion through it. That is what stays with you.
Antakly Projects · Piano Series · Vienna
What first drew you to the piano, and when did you realise it would become a serious part of your artistic identity?
My mother introduced both my brother and me to music education when we were young. At first, it was playful, simply learning where to place our hands on the piano, exploring sound out of curiosity rather than obligation.
But everything changed when I was nine years old, when my mother took me to a concert by the pianist who would later become my teacher. During that performance, I heard Chopin's Polonaise in A-flat Major. Something about that piece completely altered the way I understood music. I remember buying the score the very next day, even though I could barely read it. That moment awakened something in me. Music suddenly felt like something that needed to be discovered.
How would you describe your relationship with performance?
Performing is probably the closest experience I have to what transcendence feels like. It is one of the few moments where I simultaneously detach from my body and feel completely united with it. There is a sensation of elevation, something almost spiritual.
But for that to happen, I first have to allow myself to be vulnerable. I need the courage to be honest and authentic, and that takes immense intention. Performance, to me, is not a selfish act. It is the way I share a gift I have been given. The stage becomes an offering, a way of giving myself entirely to others.
"Performing is a dialogue. Much like tuning an instrument, you are constantly tuning yourself to the frequency of the audience. The more you experience performance as dialogue rather than output, the more sacred the act becomes."
Which artists outside of music have most influenced the way you perform?
Over time, it became very clear to me that some of the artists who most transformed my understanding of performance were not musicians at all.
One of the most important was Pina Bausch. Watching her work completely changed the way I thought about expression and emotional accessibility in art. Through dance theatre, she embodied love, nostalgia, sadness, weakness, anger, all the contradictions of being human, in a way that was both deeply profound and universally accessible. I remember seeing her piece Full Moon at BAM in New York, and it became a pivotal moment for me in understanding what performance could truly communicate.
Another defining influence has been James Turrell. I still remember my first experience encountering one of his installations. It felt miraculous, almost otherworldly. His work awakens perception itself. It makes you reconsider what it means to see, to feel, to exist within space and light. Those experiences became foundational to the way I think about performance today.
What role does live piano performance still play in contemporary culture?
Thank God it still exists. Live performance reminds us that we are alive. Watching a pianist perform is a mirror of humanity, of craftsmanship, discipline, emotion, physicality, vulnerability. It shows what human beings are capable of generating without technology. A single performance can make someone cry. It can reconnect people to themselves. And I think that is necessary now more than ever.
Can you walk us through your creative and emotional process when preparing for a performance?
Every performance begins with a question: What do I want or need to communicate right now? Even if I revisit the same programme or pieces, the intention is never the same. The bridge between intention and expression constantly changes.
Emotionally, preparation is much more difficult. About a month before a concert, I enter a kind of ritual, a sequence of daily pieces and emotional states that help ground me. For a long time, I thought I needed to control my emotions in order to perform well. But the more I perform, the more I realise that I cannot control them. I need to embrace wherever I am emotionally. That dialogue between emotional truth and creative intention becomes the narrative of the performance itself.
What do you hope audiences carry with them after hearing you perform?
I hope they carry a memory. Not necessarily of me, but of themselves, of who they were in that moment while listening. I also often hope audiences cry. Not out of sadness, but because tears are one of the closest physical expressions we have to emotional truth.
I wrote a piece called Reverse Flow of a Melting Tear inspired by the idea of tracing a tear back to its source. If you follow a tear back far enough, what do you discover about the human soul? For me, crying is evidence of vulnerability shared between performer and audience. It is proof that something real passed between us. And those moments are sacred.
Bausch dissolved the boundary between theatre and dance, building works from personal memory, repetition, and emotional rupture. Her company Tanztheater Wuppertal created performances that felt excavated rather than choreographed. For Vitale, seeing Full Moon at BAM was a pivotal moment in understanding what performance could communicate.
pina-bausch.deTurrell's work removes the object entirely. What remains is light, duration, and the perceiving body. His installations dissolve spatial orientation and make the viewer the subject. The projected film above the CMF orchestra at the Vienna concert performed a similar function: not illustration but environment, shifting the room's emotional temperature without announcing itself.
jamesturrell.comLa Quinta Stagione. The one that does not exist on the calendar. The season of music itself, where past and present and future arrive simultaneously and the listener loses track of which is which.
Alessandro Berti
Part of the Antakly Projects piano archive, twenty-three years of conversations with pianists, composers, and the people who live inside music. Read all piano interviews here.
Stay curious,