Pier Luca Pierini

Luca Petrosino: I still remember that day, when I went to that music store (now it is unfortunately closed), and saw a mandolin. I was looking for some 'ethnic tunes' for my first album as a songwriter and that tiny instrument caught my attention. I ended up buying it and immediately started to study it on my own. Eventually, I got hooked on its musicality and decided to study it at school. After that decision, my world changed surprisingly. My bond with mandolin became stronger and stronger, and the repertory that I had been discovering became more and more interesting and started to provide more and more gigs all over the country. Gianmarco Volpe: With his album, I am coming back to my origins: classical music and classical guitar. Retracing baroque music’s geometries, Romantic lyricism, and melodic and rhythmic twists of Brazilian music, has made me explore many new tonal avenues with the guitar. This instrument is always able to reinvent itself and, thanks to its popular feature, find its place within ever-evolving musical styles.

For this 2010 production, the first new staging of the opera in 10 years, Glyndebourne welcome back the winning team of director Jonathan Kent and designer Paul Brown with Festival Music Director, Vladimir Jurowski conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Set at a time of seismic social and cultural change - in a Fellini-esque vision of post-war life - Jonathan Kent's urgently propulsive production offers a 'white-knuckle rollercoaster ride' through the events of the Don's last day as they unfold in and around Paul Brown's magical 'box of tricks' set.

A trio of 16th-century Italian organist composers, two of them almost entirely new to the record catalogues.

Lolli has received relatively little attention in modern times. I haven’t, for example, been able to trace a single reference to him in the pages of MusicWeb International. Despite this he holds a rather prominent place in that line of Italian violin virtuosi which runs from a figure such as Biagio Marini through Corelli and Tartini to Paganini and Viotti. The musicologist Albert Mell has, not unreasonably, written of him that he “was from many points of view the most important violin virtuoso before Paganini” (Musical Quarterly, Vol. 44, 1958) and Simon McVeigh (in The Cambridge Companion to the Violin) has described him as “the archetypal travelling virtuoso”.