Giuliano Carmignola

A pioneer in the historical performance movement in Italy, violinist Giuliano Carmignola has had a long career extending over six decades. His work emphasizes Vivaldi and other composers of the Venetian Baroque. Carmignola was born on July 7, 1951, in Treviso, Italy, near Venice. His family was musical, and he began lessons with his father, Antonio Carmignola, at age five. Giuliano attended the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello in Venice, studying with Luigi Ferro and Sergio Lorenzi. He went on to the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, where he took classics from Franco Gulli and Nathan Milstein. He also took master classes from Henryk Szeryng at the Geneva Conservatory. It was Ferro who steered Carmignola toward the music of the 18th century and the growing historical performance movement, and when Ferro was unable to join the ensemble I Virtuosi di Roma on a U.S. tour, he tapped Carmignola as his replacement. In 1978, Carmignola became concertmaster of the orchestra at Venice's La Fenice opera house, remaining in that position until 1985. Carmignola developed historically oriented modes of playing, using no chin rest, a relatively flatter bridge, gut strings, and a Baroque bow. He has also sometimes played traditional 19th and 20th century repertory on a modern violin. Carmignola has played with major orchestras under the likes of conductors Claudio Abbado, Peter Maag, Eliahu Inbal, and Giuseppe Sinopoli. He later became involved with Italian historical performance groups such as the Sonatori de la Gioiosa Musica (with which he released his debut album of Vivaldi's Four Seasons in 1994) and later with the Venice Baroque Orchestra. With the latter group, he released a major recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons concertos in 2000, tying the works' programmatic content to specific details of the change of seasons in Venice. In 2013, he released an album of late Vivaldi concertos with the Accademia Bizantina, a representative of a younger generation of Italian Baroque players, and his career hardly slowed as he entered his sixth and seventh decades. Carmignola has recorded for Divox, Sony Classical, Archiv Produktion, Arcana, and various other labels. In 2023, on Arcana, he released the album The Three Seasons of Antonio Vivaldi with the Accademia Musicale dell'Annunciata. By that time, his recording catalog comprised more than 80 items. ~ James Manheim, Rovi