Mario Mariani

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Mario Mariani (born 6 October 1970) is an Italian pianist, composer and performer from Pesaro. He studied piano at the Conservatorio Gioachino Rossini and graduated in 1995. After forming the experimental Broz Ensemble, he began writing film soundtracks for Italian directors such as Vittorio Moroni, Gianluigi Toccafondo and Matteo Pellegrini. He also composes music for TV advertising for clients like Microsoft, Toyota, Ferrero, Tele2 and Fiat. He created two editions of the main theme for the Venice International Film Festival in 1999-2001 and 2005-2007.

Mariani is known for his eclectic piano style, treating the piano like an orchestra and blending contemporary music with theatrical performance. He often collaborates with artists such as Giuliano Del Sorbo, Massimo Ottoni and Graziella Galvani, calling his method “transpersonal instantaneous composition.”

In 2008 he won first prize for Best Soundtrack at the Novaracinefestival for the film Under My Garden by Andrea Lodovichetti. In 2010 he lived for a month inside a cave on Monte Nerone with a grand piano, giving free concerts each night. He later started the Teatro Libero del Monte Nerone festival, held every August since 2011 in a woodland area between Marche and Umbria.

His second piano solo album Elementalea (2011) led him to start his own label, Zingaroton. Since 2013 he has performed pieces from Danny Elfman’s Beetlejuice and Scissorhands scores and Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho.

Mariani has a long history with silent films. He began in the 1990s with Pesaro’s Silent Cinema retrospectives, improvising on films by directors such as Griffith, Dreyer, Wiene, Lang, Murnau, Melies and Vertov. He wrote the original soundtrack for the 1922 Italian silent film Caina by Gennaro Righelli. His A Silent Christmas project includes four silent Christmas-themed films, including A Christmas Carol and A Trap for Santa Claus (1925). In 2014 he created piano and organ music for Ferdinand Zecca’s Life and Passion of Jesus.