Simone Spagnolo
*11 February 1985
Works by Simone Spagnolo
Biography
Simone Spagnolo’s music has been performed in internationally known venues and festivals such as London's Royal Festival Hall, St.Martin-in-the-Fields, Blackheath Halls, ENO's foyer, Riverside Studios, Tete-a-Tete Festival, Opera in the City Festival, Mumford Theatre, Italian Cultural Institute London, Birmingham Conservatoire, Stanford University, Los Angeles’ Aratani Theatre, Brno’s Janacek Academy, Budapest’s Liszt Academy, Zaragoza’s Conservatorio Superiore, Chongqing University, Hong Kong’s Yuen Long Theatre, Italy’s CEF Festival and Pennsylvania’s Great Lakes Film Festival, among others.
Having composed music for concerts, theatre, opera, ballet, film and multimedia, Spagnolo has received commissioned from institutions and companies such as Trinity Laban Conservatoire, ChinaWest Productions, Opera Viscera, Gray Lady Productions, WOH Productions, Fabergé LTD, Lost Picture Production and Dance Ahead. Artists he has collaborated with include conductors Diego Garcia Rodriguez and Michael Young, musicians Rivka Golani and Gabriele Baldocci, playwrights Roberto Cavosi and Giordano Trischitta, directors Luc Mollinger and Ben Samuels, actors Sasha Waddell and Marco Gambino, choreographers Zoe Gadd and Adam Russell, photographer Valery Katsuba, and creative technologist Michele Panegrossi.
Spagnolo has received numerous awards, including the Asia America Symphony Orchestra Composition Prize and Philip Bates Prize, and in 2011 he has been appointed as artist-in-residence at Bergen's USF Verftet, Norway.
Having gained a Ph.D. in composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London, Spagnolo currently holds the position of Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for Composition (BMus and MMus) at the London College of Music, University off West London. Previously, he lectured at Anglia Ruskin University and University of Cumbria, and has guest-lectured at institutions such as the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Trinity Laban Conservatoire, University of York and The Purcell School. Also, he was founder and artistic director of The Music Theatre Hub.
Simone Spagnolo's discography includes six albums, available on iTunes and all major online music stores.
About the music
Reflecting on the world and the interplay between music and narrative is at the heart of Simone Spagnolo's artistic research, which articulates through both music composition and scholarly writing.
Having undertaken traditional studies in music and composition, Spagnolo has developed a profound curiosity for interdisciplinary interactions, within which musical composition interplays, emancipates, and amalgamates with other disciplines, as for instance narrative, theatre, drawing, design, detecting, and performance art. His compositional style, although rooted within contemporary classical music, tends to manifests through music-theatre, musical-actions, instrumental theatre, composed theatre, graphic scores, experimental opera, and other hybrid forms.
Critical Reception of Simone Spagnolo's musical work (selected examples)
“Spagnolo’s music both stimulates and satisfies the ear, at once modern, eerie and undeniably beautiful” – Charlotte Valori, ***** Operissima Whispers
“…a notable success that will repay repeated listening and deserve further outing” – Tim Hochstrasser, **** Plays to See
“The layers of orchestration are at times really moving” – Eleanor MacFarlane, ***** The Upcoming
“…a confident approach to the tricky task of structuring an hour-long work for a solo singer, as well as creating a striking and remarkably evocative score” – Planet Hugill, on Faust, Alberta
“An outstanding composer and skilled orchestrator that has a full command of the symphony orchestra” – David Benoit
“…lush and flowing music, with edges both of wildness and of formalism” – on Tasting Rhubarb.
“Imaginative Scoring” – Yeruda Saphiro, **** The Stage.