On LUCA LOMBARDI
Wolfgang Rihm was one of the most important German composers born after the Second World War.
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Maestro Armando Renzi, one of Luca Lombardi’s first teachers.
Famous teachers are not always the most important for a young composer. For Luca Lombardi (who studied with Stockhausen, B.A. Zimmermann and others) the most important teacher was undoubtedly Armando Renzi (1915-1985), an excellent musician and teacher, with whom Lombardi studied from autumn 1962 to summer 1964 and (after a year of study in Vienna) from the autumn of 1965 to the summer of 1967. In a crucial period for Lombardi’s artistic development, in which the cultural and musical closure of his teachers at the Roman Conservatory Santa Cecilia had almost managed to paralyze his ability to put his still immature compositional attempts on paper, the encounter with Renzi was providential, because he managed to unblock the compositional energy that had been harnessed and mortified by non-empathetic teachers. The first result of this “unlock” was the Divertimento for piano, written in one go in the spring of 1963. In 1966 Armando Renzi was one of the four pianists to perform Invocazione e Ditirambo for 2 pianos 8 hands in public (the other pianists were, in addition to Lombardi himself, Antonello Neri and Enrico Pasini). The same year the composition was performed in a concert of the “Gruppo Rinnovamento Musicale” at the Teatro Goldoni in Rome (with Fausto Di Cesare in place of Maestro Renzi), where the audience asked for (and obtained) an encore of the composition.
On PROSPERO
Prospero (Opera in 2 acts), First performance: Staatsoper Nürnberg, April 15, 2006.
Email from Daniel (Dan) Albright, Professor of Literature at Harvard University, author of “Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources”) to Jürgen Thym (Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music):
For a more detailed review of Prospero by Daniel Albright, see this site, in Bibliography: On Luca Lombardi’s Prospero
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Email from Ralph P. Locke (1949), musicologist, professor emeritus of musicology at the Eastman School of Music:
For a more detailed review of Ralph Locke on Prospero, see this site, in Bibliography: On Prospero
On ELIO
Stefano Belisari, aka Elio, is one of the most creative, transgressive and popular Italian rock singers. The collaboration with him began in 2000, when LL composed a song based on his lyrics (Criceto), which was followed by four other songs, collected in the cycle Minima Animalia, a cycle often performed by Elio together with the pianist Roberto Prosseda. A few years later LL called Elio to play the part of the swineherd in the opera Il re nudo (performed for the first time at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome in 2009). Another collaboration was Elio’s participation in the composition of LL Memoria (for reciting voice and 4 instruments), performed for the first time in 2009 at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.