Luigi Piovano

Luigi Piovano was awarded his cello diploma with top marks cum laude at seventeen, having studied with Radu Aldulescu, and went on to graduate also in cello and chamber music from the European Conservatoire in Paris. 

He has been very active in chamber music since 2005, playing alongside artists of the calibre of Maurizio Pollini, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Myung-Whun Chung, Alexander Lonquich, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Leonidas Kavakos, Veronika Eberle, Katia and Marielle Labeque, Nikolay Lugansky and Malcolm Bilson, and regularly in duo with Antonio Pappano. He has made solo appearances with leading orchestras around the world – Tokyo Philharmonic, New Japan Philharmonic, Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Seoul Philharmonic, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal – under the baton of conductors such as Chung, Menuhin, Nagano, Pappano, and Pletnev. He has been the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia’s first principal cello soloist for more than twenty years. Luigi Piovano plays a cello Francesco Ruggeri “detto il Per” (Cremona, 1692) on generous loan from Francesco Micheli.

As well as giving many concerts as soloist/conductor, since 2002 he has been dedicating more and more time to conducting. He has performed with such soloists as Luis Bacalov, Stefano Bollani, Pietro De Maria, Benedetto Lupo, Sara Mingardo, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, Valeriy Sokolov, François-Joël Thiollier and has recorded for Naxos three piano Concertos by Paisiello (soloist Francesco Nicolosi) and for Eloquentia Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (soloist Grazia Raimondi), the Violin Concerto by Britten (soloist Livia Sohn. He made a CD with Sara Mingardo, conducting Kindertotenlieder and Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, which won the best Lieder CD of the year in France in 2012.

From 2008 to 2016 he was Artistic Director of the Lanciano Estate Musicale Frentana.

From 2013 al 2017 he was Musical Director of the Roma Tre Orchestra.

Since 2012 he has been Musical Director of the Orchestra ICO della Magna Grecia in Taranto, and has performed with them numerous major symphonic works, including the complete Brahms symphonies and concertos, Tchaikovsky’s symphonies IV, V and VI and all the concertos, the Franck D minor symphony and both of Ravel’s concertos. 

Following the resounding success in Rome conducting the Santa Cecilia String Orchestra in a concert of music by Schubert, and the recording of the same programme for a CD issued by Eloquentia, Piovano has become the ensemble’s principal conductor. They have together been enthusiastically received in various Italian concert halls and in the Sala Santa Cecilia in Rome, first with the Dvořák and Tchaikovsky Serenades for Strings, straight away recorded for an Eloquentia CD which came out in 2016, and subsequently reissued by Arcana in 2017,  and then with a captivating programme of music by Rota, Morricone and Piovani (Arcana CD 2017) and two Mozart programmes: one with additional wind instruments and the pianist Ingrid Jacoby (on the CD the ensemble will appear as the Santa Cecilia Chamber Orchestra), and the other, only just out,  with the complete Mozart string repertoire, recorded for a CD issued with the publication “Amadeus” in November 2019, later re-released by Arcana. In the meanwhile Sony Classical came out with a CD of the Archi di Santa Cecilia under Piovano’s baton featuring Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and other concertos. Another recent release, for Sony International, is a world premiere CD of the version for cello and strings of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, produced by Luka Šulić.

Recent Italian appearances as conductor include concerts with the Orchestra Sinfonica Abruzzese, Orchestra del Teatro Petruzzelli di Bari, Camerata Strumentale Città di Prato, Orchestra del Festival di Bergamo e Brescia, Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, Orchestra Haydn di Bolzano e Trento, Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, Filarmonica Marchigiana, Orchestra da Camera dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia…, Dvořák’s Stabat Mater  at the Teatro Bellini, Catania, and abroad, his first performance with the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra.

Upcoming new projects include Tosca from the podium at the Teatro Bellini, Catania in 2021, and a concert conducting the Mozarteum, Salzburg, in 2022.