Corrado Galzio, (; Noto, November 3, 1919 – Noto, April 19, 2020) was a noted musician and piano player who founded the International Music Festival of Noto and the Italian Music Conservatory in Caracas. He promoted the popularization of musical culture as well as initiating the interchanges between Italy and Venezuela. In Venezuela, he carried out an intense career as an artist, teacher, and director of successful radio and television programmes. He is widely recognised as the father of chamber music culture in the Latin American country.
The first years and the War (1919-1947) Corrado Galzio was born in Noto, a small city located in southern Sicily, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, globally recognized for the value of its baroque architecture. He began studying the piano in Noto when still very young, under the guidance of Maestro Giuseppe Scopa. At the age of eight years old, he moved to Milan in order to pursue his studies. From there, he completed his musical education in Rome, at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory under the guidance of Maestro Renzo Silvestri. His artistic merits, representing life in Italy at the time, stood out from others. For Radio Roma, he implemented a live classical music programme, the first of its kind, and was awarded the Premio Littoriale for piano in 1940. In the same year, he went to war as a volunteer.
Venezuela (1947-2020) In 1947, Galzio emigrated to Venezuela. His first years of activity in this new country were marked by a pioneering fervor. He taught in Maracaibo at the Music Academy, and in San Cristobal, was the director of the State Conservatory. While in Caracas, Galzio founded the Italian Music Conservatory and the Monte Sacro Cultural Centre, which was a venue for concerts and meetings with personalities of the international music scene. Eminent Italian colleagues from the Santa Cecilia Academy, one of the oldest musical institutions in the world, answered his calls. Their cooperation and performances brought prestige to the Conservatory, and with these musicians, he undertook an intense concert activity that had him performing on the stages of the world. The Monte Sacro Cultural Centre is still hosting the Caracas Symphonic Municipal Orchestra.
In 1952, he founded the radio programme Temas con Variaciones, which, with the advent of television, would be broadcast live on the most important national television channel as well. Temas con Variaciones spread all over the country and aired the live concerts of various chamber ensembles created and led by Maestro Galzio. The programme also presented interviews with the most well-known and popular celebrities from Europe and America on cultural and current events topics. Radio Capital Caracas continues broadcasting Temas con Variaciones even today, now edited by Professor Einar Goyo Ponte from the University Andrés Bello. Due to its long and unbroken activity, this broadcast constitutes one of the country's oldest and most prominent cultural institutions.
Concert activity
His radio commitment and the management of various musical institutions in Italy and in Venezuela have always been associated with Maestro Corrado Galzio. In addition, he had a strong commitment to an intense concert activity that brought him to perform with many international exponents of chamber music, among them Gaspar Cassadó, Antonio Yanigro, Ricardo Odnoposoff, Dino Asciolla, Berle Senofsky, Suna Kan, Uto Ughi, Corrado Romano, Michel Rabin, lona Brown, Thèrèse Green-Coleman, Lisa Della Casa, Salvatore Accardo, Ruggero Ricci, Christian Ferras, and Pierre Fournier.
With the Santa Cecilia Academy musicians, Maestro Galzio gave birth to many chamber ensembles, including the Galzio Quartet, the Ensemble, The Santa Cecilia Soloists. These were groups featuring a free structure, open to various chamber music combinations, like trios, quartets, quintets, and sextets. With these groups, he toured Europe, Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China, always achieving great success with audiences and critics alike.
Corrado Galzio's commitment to spreading the compositions of Venezuelan authors has been consistent. In his concerts, besides the great classic repertoire (Bartok, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, De Falla, Donizetti, Dvorák, Fauré, Franck, Grieg, Glinka, Gluck, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Ravel, Schubert, Schumann, Stravinsky, and Tartini), he always included works by Venezuelan composers like Blanca Estrella, Reynaldo Hahn, Rhazés Hernández López, and Juan Bautista Plaza.