The Italian harpsichordist, organist and conductor, Marco Mencoboni, studied with Umberto Pineschi, Ton Koopman, Jesper Christensen and Gustav Leonhardt with whom he graduated at the Sweelinck Conservatorium in Amsterdam in 1990.
Marco Mencoboni has dedicated many years to the rediscovery and performance of ancient musical repertoire of Baroque and Renaissance. Thanks to his tireless dedication, many jewels of a forgotten music have been brought back to life including works by Ignazio Donati, Pietro Pace, Costanzo Porta, Bartolomeo Barbarino, Luigi Battiferri. Today, as soloist and director of the Cantar Lontano ensamble, he is in demand by many important festivals of early music internationally as Ambronay, Utrecht, Trigonale, Pontoise, Haut Jurà, Ravenna Festival, Rossini Opera Festival and many others. Since 1999 he is the Artistic Director of the Cantar Lontano festival. He rediscovered and enhanced the “Cantar Lontano” practice, an extraordinary vocal technique of Marche early ‘600. This incredible forgotten praxis is realized placing strategically the singers in the Church space, to the imitation of many choruses, to create a spectacular widespread effect sound. This research has led to the need to transform the unexpected places in real theaters for music, element that characterized his work in recent years, leading him to perform pieces of the Renaissance mixing natural voices to the horns of seven ships in the port of Ancona. In 2010 he began working with the Pier Luigi Pizzi around the work of Monveverdi. His latest creation is Canalgrande adriatic baroque orchestra, an orchestra composed of musicians born and raised near the Adriatic Sea, an international project that unites musicians Italians, Croats, Slovenes, Albanians and Greeks.
Since 2013, Marco Mencoboni collaborates as a lecturer at the Accademia Rossiniana di Alberto Zedda at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro. Since 2015 he is Vice President of REMA, the European association of early music festivals. For the Early Music Festival Utrecht he made in 2016 a series of video tutorials on the peculiarities of early music. |