Lorenza Borrani


"While having a formidable technique, she is not a virtuoso phenomenon, but something different that has to do intimately with music."
Lorenza Borrani is an Italian violinist. She performs as leader, ensemble director, soloist and chamber musician all over the world. To the concert activity she adds that of professor of violin and chamber orchestras.

Early life

"I was five, I didn't have any idea what lungs are"
Lorenza originally wanted to play the trumpet as she had just seen the elephant trumpeters in the Walt Disney movie "Robin Hood". The music school didn't approve of her wanting to play the trumpet as she was too young and her lungs were not big enough. They started her off on the violin instead.

Education

"I met Lorenza Borrani when she was 9 years old at the Music School of Fiesole. She was a sweet and enthusiastic child, together with her mother we went to see the concert Itzhak Perlman held at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, it was the early 90s. Great Perlman and great Lorenza, who over the years has been able to conquer the public and critics with her wonderful qualities of interpreter."
Loreanza Borrani thinks it is very important to mention the education of a musician and she feels very faithful to the teachers of her youth.
It was a Dutch lady, a neighbor, who noticed her curiosity about music. She began taking violin lessons, around age five, at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, studying with Alina Company; Piero Farulli, Zinaida Gilels and Pavel Vernikov. In her concert debut in 1995 at the theatre "La Pergola" in Florence, she performed Bach’s Concerto for 2 Violins with Pavel Vernikov and the direction of Emmanuel Krivine, in the presence of the at that time Italian Republic President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro. She undertook postgraduate studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria, with Boris Kuschnir and participated in masterclasses with Pier Narciso Masi, Mstislav Rostropovich, Ana Chumachenko, Maya Glezarova and Ilya Grubert.
Often, in her interviews, Lorenza Borrani recalled the importance that some conductors, with whom she worked, have had in her musical growth. Among them, especially Lorin Maazel, Claudio Abbado and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Career

"Maybe the moment I like most about my role as a musician is rehearsal. The moment in which something is built, more than the moment in which the product is presented. The moment of the 'work in progress' is really very special for me."
Since 2008 Lorenza Borrani has been Leader of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.
In 2003 she became leader of Symphonica Toscanini, directed by Lorin Maazel.
She was a member of Orchestra Mozart from 2005 to 2008, with whom she performed Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 7 under Claudio Abbado in 2006. A nice episode of her experience with the Orchestra Mozart was the waltz danced with Roberto Benigni during the performance of Peter and the Wolf conducted by Claudio Abbado, in Bologna.
In 2007 she was one of the co-founder of Spira Mirabilis, a musical laboratory "to continue to study, to meet, to learn and to rehearse together, and then to share music with an audience". Thanks to this project and to the meeting with italian clarinetist Lorenzo Coppola, Lorenza Borrani developed curiosity and passion for the execution of the classical repertoire on period instruments.
She also played in the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra under Claudio Abbado and in 2018 and 2019 she played again as leader of the Orchestra Mozart directed by Bernard Haitink.
She has performed as a guest-leader or directed ensembles such as the European Union Youth Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, Filarmonica della Scala, Bayerischen Rundfunk Orchester, Freiburger Barockorchester, Det Norske Kammerorkester , Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, Vallès Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Tenerife 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.
As chamber musician, Lorenza Borrani has collaborated with Isabelle Faust, Daniel Hope, András Schiff, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Janine Jansen, Irina Fiodorovna Schnittke, Christian Tetzlaff, Alexander Lonquich
, Mario Brunello and others.
In 2018 Lorenza Borrani debuted at Schloss Elmau the ‘Mozart Quintets’ project, a collaboration with her close chamber music partners dedicated to the study and period performance of Mozart’s rarely performed string quintets. In 2019 the quintet played the complete Mozart's string and wind quintets for the Amici della Musica of Florence at the theatre "La Pergola", and in January 2021 the quintet, named Spunicunifait, will perform in Salzburg at the Mozart Week, the Salzburg's festival for classical music in winter, around the time of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthday, organized by the International Mozarteum Foundation.
As concertmaster of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Lorenza Borrani appears in the season 2020-2021 of the Philharmonie Berlin in a concert with the pianist Yuja Wang.
She is a member of the Honorary Committee of the project "Farulli 100" dedicated in 2020 to the memory of Piero Farulli on the centenary of his birth.
She performs on a Santo Serafino violin.

Teaching

"She’s a unique and dynamic musical force. Students feel a deep appreciation for how she instils, in each player, truly ambitious expectations of creative collaboration."
In addition to performing and conducting, Lorenza Borrani is a Professor of Violin at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole and in May 2020 she has been appointed to the role of Visiting Professor of Chamber Orchestras by the Royal Academy of Music in London.