Vittorio Ghielmi is a viol player, conductor, composer and professor and head of the Institute for Early Music at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg and a visiting professor at the Royal College of Music in London.
As a soloist and conductor, he appears at the world’s leading concert halls and has performed with such renowned orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Il Giardino Armonico and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. Since 2000 he has formed a duo with lutenist Luca Pianca. As one of the leading musicians of the historically informed performance practice, he has collaborated with musicians such as Gustav Leonhardt, Cecilia Bartoli, Reinhard Goebel, András Schiff, Thomas Quasthoff and Viktoria Mullova, as well as assisting Riccardo Muti.
With his own orchestra, Il Suonar Parlante, which performs at leading venues, Vittorio Ghielmi is devoted to new explorations of the early music repertoire, as well creating new projects and performing with important jazz musicians such as Kenny Wheeler, Uri Caine, Paolo Fresu and Markus Stockhausen. As a soloist, he has recorded numerous CDs and received many awards.
Vittorio Ghielmi has also participated in the world premieres of new compositions, including Nadir Vassena’s Bagatelle trascendentali for viola da gamba, lute and orchestra at the Philharmonie in Berlin in 2006, Uri Caine’s Concerto for viola da gamba and string orchestra at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 2008 and also Uri Caine’s Danube Dreams in Passau in 2012.
In 2007 he conceived and conducted a play based on Buxtehude’s cantata cycle Membra Jesu nostril with the US film maker Marc Reshovsky. He was also artist in residence at the Stuttgart Music Festival in 2010 and at the MUSEG Festival in Segovia in 2015. In the summer of 2018 he conducted Rameau’s Pigmalion at the Drottningholm Palace Theatre in a production by Saburo Teshigawara.
His work has been recognized with the Erwin Bodky Award in Cambridge in 1997 and an Echo Klassik in 2015. His various collaborations with traditional musicians were documented in the film The Heart of Sound – A musical journey with Vittorio Ghielmi.
Vittorio Ghielmi plays an original viol made by Michel Colichon in Paris in 1688.
