In 1995, Lotoro founded the Orchestra Musica Judaica. In the 1990s, he conceived the project of collecting the musical literature produced by musicians in captivity during the Holocaust, starting with the collection and recording of all the piano and chamber music works written by Alois Piňos, Petr Pokorný, Petr Eben and others after the Prague Spring, and above all by recording works for the music Encyclopedia in 48 CD-volumes titled KZ Musik. KZ Musik which consists of the recording of the musical corpus created in places of captivity, deportation and deprivation of human rights from the opening of the Dachau and Börgermoor camps until liberation at the end of the Second World War and on the Eurasian and the Pacific sides. In this collection he recorded Symphony No. 8 by Erwin Schulhoff for piano, the piano score of Don Quixote tanzt Fandango by Viktor Ullmann and of Nonet by Rudolf Karel. As a composer he created the opera Misha e i lupi and the Suite "Golà" for singer and chamber orchestra. He is the author of the volumes Fonte di ogni bene: canti di risveglio ebraico composti dal 1930 al 1945 a Sannicandro Garganico, Renato Virgilio. Vita e opere di un musicista, Alla ricerca della musica perduta. Prolegomeni a una letteratura musicale concentrazionaria and Antologia musicale concentrationaria: opere musicali scritte in cattività civile e militare durante la Seconda guerra mondiale. Conductor Paolo Candido collaborated with him on the first and second book.
Institute of Concentrationary Music Literature
In 2014, with his wife Grazia Tiritiello and other partners, Lotoro established the Foundation Institute of Concentrationary Music Literature based in Barletta, a non-profit organization that takes care of the archive of music scores written in concentration camps. The archive includes 8,000 music scores, 12,000 audiovisual and paper documents and 3,000 non-fiction books. The Foundation, of which Lotoro is President, promotes also the Citadel of Concentrationary Music, the world's biggest hub dedicated to the concentrationary music to be built in the same city, near an ancient and disused distillery. Francesco Lotoro and the concentrationary music are the subject of two international publishing initiatives: the book Le Maestro: A la recherche de la musique des camps by French writer Thomas Saintourens and the documentary Maestro by the Franco-Argentine director Alexandre Valenti, an Italian-French co-production of 2017 screened in cinemas all over the world and aired on major international TV channels. In December 2019, Lotoro's work was the subject of a 60 minutes story.
Private life
He married Grazia Tiritiello, his main collaborator; they have no children. Francesco and Grazia converted to Judaism in 2004.
