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The Italian harpsichordist, composer and music pedagogue, Fernando De Luca, started to compose in the Baroque idiom at 9 or before. At 14, he joined the Conservatory of Rome Santa Cecilia to study Organ and Piano, although his true passion was the Harpsichord. Among the many musical experiences De Luca had during his early activity in Roman musical life, one of the most important was his apprenticeship with Mons. Domenico Bartolucci who was Maestro di Cappella (Kapell Meister / Chapel’s Master) for the Cappella Sistina in the Vatican. Here Fernando approached the study of Sacred Music, counterpoint and learnt the art of improvisation and composition. He graduated in 1987 (Piano, with V. De Vita) and 1992 (Harpsichord, with Paola Bernardi) and in the same years, was a prizewinner in the AMR (Associazione Musicale Romana) and a harpsichord contest at G.Rossini Conservatory in Pesaro.
Fernando De Luca has played in the following Italian and European Baroque Music Festivals, either as soloist or continuo player, including the Accademia Barocca di Santa Cecilia (Rome), Oratorio del Gonfalone (Rome, Via Giulia), Festival di mezza estate (Tagliacozzo), Estate Fiesolana, Villa Medici (Rome), Festival Barocco del Salento, Sagra Musicale Umbra (Segni Barocchi); and in France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Norway and, more recently (May 2009) in Montreal (Canada).
Fernando De Luca has been the first modern performer on the harpsichord (in a live concert) of Joseph Nicolas Pancrace Royer’s Opera Omnia. In addition to a very rich French repertoire, he has performed a number of world premieres from the English and German baroque productions, such as John Sheels, Thomas Chilcot, Richard Jones, Johann Kuhnau and George Frideric Handel.
In 1989, for the third centennial of death of Christina of Sweden, Fernando De Luca founded a musical ensemble, Et in Arcadia Ego, specialized in Italian music of late 17th and early 18th centuries.
In 2006, Fernando was the co-founder, together with his friend Zadok, of the Sala del Cembalo del caro Sassone (see link below). It's a website dedicated to the harpsichord music of the Baroque era, with an huge amount of recordings played by himself and other professional musicians; he still continues to provide, month-by-month, an increasing number of harpsichord pieces, totally no-profit and freely playable using flash streaming. As of today (November 2011), he has recorded about 110 hours of music! De Luca has become one of the the most famous harpsichordist over the Internet, very popular especially in the UK and the USA, due to his acclaimed efforts to perform and record, for the first time in the history, the G.F. Handel’s Complete Harpsichord Compositions. He is also the first to have transcribed and recorded a number of orchestral pieces to the harpsichord, including the Sixty Complete Ouvertures from the G.F. Handel’s Operas and Oratorios. He has also recorded several J.S. Bach’s lute anf keboard works; most recently (2011) the complete Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, Book 1 (BWV 846-869).
Currently Fernando De Luca lives in Rome, where in addition to composing, he is a member of the Period Instruments Orchestra Accademia Barocca di Santa Cecilia (directed by Paolo Pollastri), where he is the keyboard soloist and basso continuo player. He is also a member of Vox Saeculorum, a society of composers working in early historical styles, whose founded by Grant Colburn, Roman Turovsky et al. De Luca teaches Harpsichord and ancient Keyboards in the Conservatory Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina in Cagliari.
The arcadian name of Fernando De Luca is “Falerno Ducande”. |
