The Italian horn player Guglielmo Pellarin celebrates the demanding programme with delicate and lean sound, fine musical sensitivity and brilliant technique, effectively supported by his compatriot Federico Lovato.
Holger Arnold, FONO FORUM
Guglielmo Pellarin is, since 2008, principal solo horn of the “Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia”.
He was born into a musical family, and he received his first music teachings from his parents, and he also owe to them the choice of the horn itself: his father is a oboist and his mother a pianist, but they had a soft spot for the horn, for its sound and its repertoire (in particular Brahms’ Trio Op. 40). Their recommendation to try was the beginning of his journey.
He started playing the horn when he was seven, and from the very beginning he could immediately attend and breathe the air of an international music festival: the “Estate Musicale a Portogruaro”, which takes place in his hometown, gave him the rare fortune to begin with Ifor James as a mentor. Among his subsequent teachers, the most important ones were Guido Corti, Eric Terwilliger, Andrea Corsini, Markus Maskuniitty, László Seeman and Giorgio Arvati, his teacher at the Conservatory of Udine where he graduated in 2003 with the highest marks and honours.
He attended conservatory and high school in the same years and as a young musician he participated in his first great orchestral experience: two weeks in Bremen playing Berlioz’s “Fantastic Symphony” with a youth orchestra. During those days he suddenly realized that his whole time was dedicated to music and he had the epiphany that made him thinking: “This is what I want to do.”
His orchestral training continued with the Italian Youth Orchestra and at the Texas Music Festival. After that, he started working at the Teatro Verdi in Trieste and at Teatro La Scala in Milan, before winning the position of principal solo horn of the “Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia”.
In his orchestral experience, he collaborates with renowned orchestras in the international scene including London Symphony Orchestra, Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Mozart Orchestra, under Lorin Maazel, Claudio Abbado, Georges Prêtre, Valerij Gergiev, Daniel Harding, and other great conductors.
In his musical life teaching is also very important, and he learns a lot from this activity. He is horn teacher at the “I Fiati” class of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and at the Conservatorio Cesare Pollini in Padua, in addition to masterclasses in Europe, Asia, and South America.
As a chamber musician he took part in important festivals and concert seasons all over the world as horn player of the Italian Wonderbrass Quintet and of the “Quintetto di Fiati Italiano” as well as of the Opter Ensemble.
These years of chamber music festivals, left an imprint on him, and the chamber music repertoire is the context where today he still feels musically at home and of which he enjoys everything: the way to work, the repertoire, the opportunity to do research in order to make the public discover less-known music, as important as the most famous masterpieces. Guglielmo Pellarin brings this approach also to the first album he released, “French Music for horn and piano” (Audite), recording for the first time with pianist Federico Lovato Jean Michel Damase’s Sonata. Moreover the Opter Ensemble, which he founded, performs Daniele Zanettovich and Francesca Francescato’s exclusive arrangements of Brahms’s Serenade op. 11 by and R. Strauss’s “Till Eulenspiegels”.
Finally, whenever he can, Guglielmo Pellarin takes refuge between the peaks and paths of his beloved Dolomites or he studies a bit of Mathematics, for which he has a passion equal to that he has for music and which he studied at the University of Padua, where he graduated from.