artist in residence

Lorenza Borrani’s musical leadership skills have taken her around the world as both concertmaster and ensemble director, as well as in solo and chamber work. Since 2008 she has been concertmaster of Chamber Orchestra of Europe. There she had the opportunity to work with Nikolaus Harnoncourt, who inspired her love and knowledge of period performance practice. Her leadership skills were recognised early on – she led orchestras including Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Lorin Maazel’s Symphonica Toscanini. She was also appointed to Claudio Abbado’s Orchestra Mozart between 2005 and 2008, with which she performed Mozart’s Violin Concerto No.7. More recently, she has directed groups such as Freiburger Barockorchester and Australian Chamber Orchestra, with whom she premiered her own orchestral arrangement of Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No.1 on tour across Australia in spring 2019. In future seasons, she will return to play–direct at Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and make her debuts with Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Bern and Arctic Philharmonic. Borrani is one of the co-founders of Spira mirabilis, a laboratory for the preparation and performance of orchestral and chamber music repertoire of all periods, which works without a conductor or leader. Their recent projects have included Beethoven’s Symphony No.9, fragments from Mozart’s Così fan tutte and the premiere of Colin Matthew’s Spiralling, in Aldeburgh. As a chamber musician, Borrani has collaborated with artists such as András Schiff, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Janine Jansen and Daniel Hope, and she regularly plays in a duo with Alexander Lonquich. This season her collaborations include a programme of Schumann and Brahms with Kristian Bezuidenhout and colleagues at the Köln Philharmonie and Bozar. She will also focus on Mozart’s two-viola quintets, working alongside colleagues to bring these masterpieces to a wider audience. The group made its first appearance at Schloss Elmau in March 2018 and will continue to tour the works in 2019/2020. Borrani becomes Artist-in-Residence of Norwegian Chamber Orchestra in 2020. Projects she is developing with them include a staged performance of Haydn’s Symphony No.60, based on incidental music for ‘Le Distrait’ by Jean-François Regnard. As a soloist she has collaborated with conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Trevor Pinnock, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Bernard Haitink. Borrani studied with Alina Company, Piero Farulli, Zinaida Gilels and Pavel Vernikov at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, and took the postgraduate course at the Kunstuniversität Graz with Boris Kuschnir. She is a Professor of Violin at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole and plays on a Santo Serafino violin, made in Venice in 1745.