Biographies

After studying at the Conservatories of Rome, Portogruaro and Vienna, Marco Fiorini soon became one of the most interesting concertmasters of his generation. Concertmaster of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, he has played the same role, among others, with the Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala in Milan, the Symphonica Toscanini, the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne and the KBS Symphony Orchestra of Seoul (South Korea). He has devoted himself to an intense chamber music activity, collaborating with renowned musicians such as Myung-Whun Chung, Alexander Lonquich, David Geringas, Mario Brunello, Boris Petruschansky, Antony Pay and Veronika Hagen.

In 1995 he founded the Quartetto di Roma, which pursued an intense concert activity in Europe, the Far East and the USA, and recorded for Brilliant, Naxos and Bottega Discantica. Marco Fiorini has also played with the Prometeo Quartet in England, Switzerland, Germany, Spain and Armenia, as well as at the Ravenna and Ravello Festivals in Italy.

Among his solo commitments, his appearance at the Festival Casals in Spain and his interpretations of the Beethoven Concerto at the Parco della Musica in Rome and of Respighi’s Concerto Gregoriano with the Rome Symphony Orchestra are worth noting.

In 2020 he joined the renowned ensemble I Musici as concertmaster, with whom he recorded Vivaldi’s Four Seasons for Decca and toured in Germany, Spain, Italy and South Korea.

Since 2019 Marco Fiorini has been violin teacher at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome. He regularly holds violin specialisation courses and master classes, chamber music and orchestra courses, also in the capacity of conductor, both in Italy and abroad (Spain, Singapore).

She graduated in violin with top marks from the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome under Umberto Spiga. She went on to study violin with Pavel Vernikov and Zinaida Gilels, and string quartet with Raphael Hillyer (Juilliard Quartet), Sadao Harada (Tokyo Quartet) and Piero Farulli.

A passionate chamber musician, in 1995 she founded the Quartetto di Roma with Marco Fiorini; the quartet was immediately awarded a prize at the Trapani International Competition and has since performed intensively in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Norway, Turkey, Singapore, the United States and above all Germany.

With this ensemble she has appeared at major events such as the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, the Orlando Festival (Netherlands), the Neuschwanstein Festival (Germany), the Mozart Festival in Augsburg (Germany) and the Settimane Musicali Meranesi. She has recorded for RAI, Spanish National Radio, Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich and Deutschland Radio in Berlin. Her discography is also substantial, with recordings for Bottega Discantica, Naxos and Brilliant Classics.

She has given violin and chamber music master classes at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore and at Washington University in Seattle.

Alongside her quartet activity she plays with the Trio Nahars, founded in 1997 at the Imola Academy, which has also given first performances of contemporary composers such as Silvia Colasanti, Enrico Marocchini, Guido Baggiani and Antonio D’Antò.

She has combined chamber music with orchestral work: in 1996 she won the competition for section violin in the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, playing with the orchestra until 2012. She has also played with the Orchestra de I Pomeriggi in Milan, the Orchestra da Camera di Mantova and I Musici di Roma.

She holds a permanent post teaching ensemble music for strings at the Conservatorio “A. Casella” in L’Aquila.

Born in Cologne, she graduated in violin and viola from the Istituto Musicale “L. Boccherini” in Lucca, under her father, Prof. Antonio Ardinghi, and Prof. Claudio Valenti.

She continued her viola studies with Arrigo Pelliccia, Dino Asciolla and Milan Škampa, attending the string quartet courses of the Accademia Chigiana in Siena with Piero Farulli and Andrea Nannoni.

She has collaborated in chamber music with internationally renowned soloists, including Christopher Hogwood, and has made several recordings, among them Giacomo Puccini’s Requiem for solo viola, organ and choir, published by Bongiovanni, and the complete instrumental music of Cimarosa with the period-instrument ensemble “L’Arte dell’Arco” for the magazine Amadeus.

She has been principal viola with the symphony orchestras of Sanremo, Lucca and Padua and with the Accademia I Filarmonici di Verona. With the chamber groups of the Orchestra A. Toscanini of Parma she took part in the contemporary music series in Boston (The Boston Musica Viva, The Museum of Fine Arts).

For more than 15 years she has devoted herself to teaching violin to children from the age of three, according to the Suzuki Method, holding the European ESA (European Suzuki Association) diploma at levels 1, 2, 3 and 4, as well as the level 1 and 2 diploma for teaching viola.

She is the violist of the Nuovo Quintetto Boccherini, with which, together with Pietro Bosna, Marco Fiorini, Biancamaria Rapaccini and Alessandra Montani, she continues the work of dissemination begun in the 1960s by Pina Carmirelli’s Quintetto Boccherini.

Principal cello of the prestigious I Musici, the longest-standing Italian ensemble, founded in Rome in 1952 with the praise of Arturo Toscanini. In 2012-2013, for the ensemble’s 60th anniversary, he took part in various solo roles in a world tour of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Italy, Germany, Spain, Russia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey, performing in the most prestigious halls, as is the group’s custom, and earning warm praise from critics and audiences: “Rossini’s variations, played with carefree virtuosity by Pietro Bosna” (The Washington Post, 22 October 2012, Joan Reinthaler).

Until it disbanded, he was the cellist of the Trio Matisse, a celebrated Italian chamber ensemble and winner of the Vittorio Gui Prize in Florence, appearing in leading Italian series such as MI.TO, Unione Musicale di Torino, Filarmonica Romana and the Concerti del Quirinale. With the trio he took part in a project on O. Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps, with the reading of an unpublished text by Susanna Tamaro, written and read for the occasion by the author herself. With this ensemble he made a significant contribution to the dissemination of chamber works by contemporary composers: Alessandro Solbiati, Luca Francesconi, György Kurtág and many others.

His most recent solo recording is for Naxos: the concertos for violin, cello, piano and orchestra by Ghedini (“L’Albatros”) and Casella (Concerto op. 56), with the Orchestra I Pomeriggi Musicali of Milan conducted by Damian Iorio; the disc was awarded four stars by “The Guardian” and a “Choc de Classica”.

On several occasions he has performed the most important chamber works of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the violinist R. Honeck, Konzertmeister of the Wiener Philharmoniker, at the summer festival “Pietre che Cantano” in L’Aquila. He has played as soloist and in basso continuo with C. Hogwood and, under G. Leonhardt, the concertos of C. Ph. E. Bach, and has made solo recordings on period instruments for Chandos and Deutsche Harmonia Mundi.

He was principal cello of the Solisti Italiani (formerly Virtuosi di Roma) and of the Virtuosi Italiani, of which he was a founder, also taking part in crossover projects such as a charity tour to Baghdad between the first and second Gulf Wars with F. Battiato and the Baghdad Symphony Orchestra, with a video featuring important solo roles for EMI. For many years he was principal solo cello with leading Italian orchestras such as the Teatro Regio di Torino, the Teatro Comunale di Bologna and the Orchestra Sinfonica dell’Emilia-Romagna “A. Toscanini”.

Born in Bari, he graduated there with top marks and honours; he received a generous scholarship from the City of Bari as the best graduate of 1986 and the opportunity to perform Dvořák’s Concerto with his city’s symphony orchestra. He studied in Bari with Vito Paternoster, in Florence with Amedeo Baldovino, and in Brescia with Antonio Janigro and Mario Brunello. He studied chamber music with Piero Farulli of the unforgettable Quartetto Italiano and with Isaac Stern in New York, at a chamber music workshop at Carnegie Hall with the Trio Stradivari, the only Europeans selected, led by J. Starker, J. Laredo and members of the Beaux Arts Trio, Eugene Istomin and Henry Meyer (LaSalle Quartet). At the end of this extraordinary experience he performed F. Schubert’s Trio op. 99 in Carnegie’s Main Hall with his colleagues Federico Guglielmo and Jolanda Violante.

Prize-winner at the Vercelli Competition in 1989 in duo with Jolanda Violante, he was a finalist at the Parkhouse Award in London and at the Paris International Chamber Music Competition.

His main solo recordings are published by DHM, Denon, Chandos, EMI, Naxos, Foné and Dynamic (Tartini’s cello concertos) and Stradivarius (Rossini’s “Une Larme”), as well as concerts recorded by Radio France, RAI, Swiss Radio and Radio New Zealand National. RadioRai broadcast in prime time a concert by I Musici from the Parco della Musica in Rome, for the ensemble’s 60th anniversary, in which he performed Vivaldi’s Double Concerto RV 531 with Vito Paternoster. His latest recording is with Deutsche Grammophon and Albrecht Mayer, principal oboe of the Berliner Philharmoniker: “Tesori d’Italia”.

Under Antonio Mosca, he obtained the Level 1 Suzuki teaching qualification at the European Suzuki Institute.

Alessandra Montani graduated with honours in 1996 from the Morlacchi Conservatory in Perugia with Francesco Pepicelli. She continued her studies with Mario Brunello (Accademia Chigiana in Siena), Marianne Chen (Centro Sammarinese Studi Musicali) and Rocco Filippini, and studied chamber music with Pier Narciso Masi (Imola Music Academy), Dario De Rosa and Franco Rossi.

In 2007 she obtained the Second-Level Academic Diploma at the Conservatorio “Briccialdi” in Terni with top marks, and in 2010 the qualification to teach. In 2022 and 2023 she gained two further Second-Level Academic Diplomas, in choral conducting and in chamber music.

She has been awarded many prizes in national and international competitions (Stresa, Lamezia Terme, Vittorio Veneto). She began a busy concert activity, playing with many ensembles (Solisti Aquilani, Umbria Chamber Orchestra, the Orchestra of Rome and Lazio as “concertino”) and performing for important associations such as the Amici della Musica in Perugia, the Amici della Musica in Avellino, the Sagra Musicale Umbra and the Amici della Musica in Novara.

Her great dedication to chamber music has taken her to the United States, Canada, Spain, Germany and France, playing in many different groups from quartet to sextet.

For the Bottega Discantica label she recorded Mozart’s and Brahms’ Quintets for clarinet and string quartet, performing this programme in broadcast for the international channel Euroradio from the Quirinale in Rome.

In 2000 she turned to early music, discovering a true passion for this repertoire and for this way of approaching it. She then began the study of the baroque cello, attending the Scuola Civica in Milan with Gaetano Nasillo, and has continued to study ever since in order to acquire a deeper knowledge of the composers of this period. A founding member of the Hermans Baroque Academy, she has recorded 18 CDs with this ensemble for Bongiovanni, Tactus, Bottega Discantica, Brilliant Classics and Glossa.

In 2003 she joined the Quartetto di Roma, with which she has taken part in many European festivals. In 2008 she gave concerts and taught master classes at the Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore. In 2010 and 2011 she was invited to perform for the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic, and in Spain in 2010 she had the honour of playing the priceless Stradivari at the Palacio Real in Madrid. With this group she has recorded 8 CDs.

Since 2021 she has been teaching chamber music at the Conservatorio “Gesualdo da Venosa” in Potenza.