Donemus Webshop — Stradivari, Luca Natali

Luca N. Stradivari (1993, Cremona) is an international composer, a theatrical wrangler, a visual artist and a poet who likes being a street-fighter from time to time.
Education: Along with 9 years of private lessons of violin under the guidance of G. Rozzi – teacher of the international school Antonio Stradivari in Cremona, he is a self-taught pianist since he started composing at the age of 15.
He graduated at the University of Nottingham, BA (Hons) in Music in 2016.
Composition: He composed so far 16 musical works for different kind of ensembles such as string quartets, string quintets, including also a score for wind orchestra, a piano concerto, various piano melodies and so on.
His music, especially his concert The King is Dead on the First World War – commissioned him when he was 21 for the international festival of Salò - has been defined on the papers as “paradoxically intuitive”, supporting the idea of the universality of his music.
He doesn’t like to consider music as a form of art, rather he considers the human soul with its deepness and limitations as Pure Art to be expressed with any possible mean, hence the wideness of his work that expands itself from wrought iron creations and avant-garde theatre performances on madness to proper music performances in concert halls.
His young works such as his string quintets (Aquila d’Oro, Primavera, Le nevi dei Sogni, Concerto Grande, Orlando Furioso), his symphonic poem Pendragon, and his piano melodies are quite tonal and thoughtful. On the other hand, all the works after the age of 20 are surely more chromatic and hazardous, dealing with philosophical and political themes such as his piano concerto Cosmos – Anthropos – Atlantico, his string quartets (Sans Elle ne Puis, Jijì, Racconto d’Oltremare), his choral composition Pazonta dealing with the Passion of Christ and most of all his concert The King is Dead on the First World War.
Other Experiences: Along with music, he has been performing in theatres since the age of 6 working with his mother’s theatre troupe and still nowadays, he proposes to different countries his own works for theatre such as The House of the Mad performed both in Italy and in London. In the last two years he has also started to experiment on canvas, creating paintings which has been exposed already in London, Cambridge and in his own hometown, Cremona in Italy. And finally, the niche yet famous publisher Pulcino/Elefante of Alberto Casiraghy published throughout the last 4 years a series of poems of his.
“I was born literally into the Art”, Stradivari says: “For more than 400 years my ancestors have been researching for Beauty and Aesthetical perfection. If we just consider the last century for example, my grand-father, Mario Stradivari (1883-1956), although been forced to be a lawyer and carry on this family tradition, he had been able to develop his passion for music and composition, performing as pianist and even staging an opera of his in Cremona whose score used to be checked by Pietro Mascagni from time to time in the name of their friendship. Antonia Stradivari, my mother, is a golden-medal theatre actress graduated from the Filodrammatici academy of Milan, who grew my up on the stage since I was 6. I didn’t choose to be a composer, I’m just following my own destiny. That’s what nowadays people don’t understand. They think that being an artist is cool, but being a true artist means to carve into yourself through a painful process of exploration and expression for showing the audience without filters an honest piece of Art”.
Awards:
May 2012 - my first quintet Orlando Furioso wins the Honorable Mention at the first international competition Ottorino Respighi, arranged by the Chamber Orchestra of New York.
May 2014 – I got finalist at the international competition in Milan of the “100 Cellos” in which a composition of mine was played in the Triennale of Milan, conducted by Giovanni Sollima, musical director of the competition.
May 2014- my third quintet Aquila d’Oro wins once again the Honorable Mention (not annual awarded) at the international competition prize Ottorino Respighi arranged by the Chamber Orchestra of New York.