Board

Lorenzo Frassà is Honorary member of the Centro Studi Opera omnia Luigi Boccherini-Onlus (Lucca). He graduated in musicology at the University of Pavia/Cremona in 2003 with a dissertation in opera history entitled «Il teatro musicale di G. Rossini, 1810-1823: relazioni con le fonti e varianti d'autore: alcune considerazioni». His fields of research particularly concern the operatic world in the eighteenth-twentieth centuries. He edited the volumes "The Opéra-comique in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries", Turnhout, Brepols (Speculum Musicae, 15) and "Verdi Reception" with Michela Niccolai (Studies on Italian Music History, 7). 

Massimiliano Locanto is Associate Professor in History of Music at the University of Salerno. In 2000 he received a grant from the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel and in 2003 he earned a PhD. in Musical Philology, with a dissertation on Igor Stravinsky’s serial compositions. He has taught at the University of Pavia, Faculty of Musicology, as adjunct professor for Musical analysis (2003-2005). His research interests and publications are in two distinct areas: the history of medieval monody — Gregorian chant, liturgical tropes, early Italian lyric with music – and twentieth-century music, with a particular focus on the works of Igor Stravinsky and on the relationship between music theories, compositional techniques, and scientific thought. He published the monograph Stravinsky and the Musical Body: Creative Process and Meaning (Brepols 2021) and edited the volumes: Igor Stravinsky: Sounds and Gestures of Modernism (Turnhout, Brepols, 2014), Composition and Improvisation in Fifteenth-Century Music (with Julie E. Cumming and Jesse Rodin) (Lucca, LIM, 2017) and (with Sofia Lannutti) Tracce di una tradizione sommersa. I primi testi lirici italiani tra poesia e musica (Firenze, Sismel, 2005). His articles and reviews appeared in various national and international journals such as Music Analysis, Europa Orientalis, Il Saggiatore Musicale, Revue Belge de Musicologie, Musica e Storia, Rivista Internazionale di Musica Sacra, Rivista di Analisi e Teoria Musicale. In 2016 he was awarded the “Renato Musto” prize for Musicology under the patronage of the Rector of Naples University “Federico II”.

Orchestral conductor and pianist, Simone Luti is quickly gaining recognition and acclaim for his musical instincts and sensitivity on the podium and at the keyboard. He has conducted on the podiums for such organizations as The Musical Festival in Ticino Locarno, Switzerland, in Albania at the Opera Theatre in Tirana, the Symphony Orchestra of Bacau, Romania, and the International Opera Theatre of Philadelphia (in Teatro degli Avvaloranti, Città della Pieve; Teatro Mancinelli, Orvieto; and The University of Performing Arts, Philadelphia). At the keyboard, Mr. Luti has performed as a solo and collaborative pianist in recitals, opera galas, and chamber groups for theatres and musical institutes throughout Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium, playing. Of note was his debut at the Lucerne Festival playing for soprano Irina Lungu. He is currently the Artistic and Musical Director of AEDO: he recently conducted Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi, Così fan tutte , Don Giovanni, The turn of the screw, Le nozze di Figaro, Butterfly, La Cenerentola and Die Zauberflote, in Lucca and in Amsterdam. He is also the Head Coach of Opera program at Western University, London Ontario.

Michela Niccolai, Ph.D. in Musicology (Saint-Étienne / Pavie), currently works on the repertoire of cabaret songs, music for the shadow theater and the music-hall in Montmartre (ca. 1880-1930). At the University of Montréal (OICRM) she completed a post-doctorate project on the editing of Charpentier’s various musical and social writings (forthcoming, Vrin, MusicologieS). She published La Dramaturgie de Gustave Charpentier (2011) and Giacomo Puccini et Albert Carré: «Madame Butterfly» à Paris (2012, First Prize ‘Gouden Label’ Award 2014, Klassiek Centraal), and Debussy’s «Pelléas et Mélisande»: The Staging by Albert Carré (2017). She edited the books Verdi Reception (with L. Frassà, 2013), Gustave Charpentier et son temps (with J.-C. Branger, 2013), Orchestral Conducting in Nineteenth Century (with R. Illiano, 2014) and Musical Theatre in Europe 1830-1945 (with C. Rowden, 2017). His last publication, written with Charlotte Ginot-Slacik, Musiques dans l'Italie fasciste (1922-1943), has just come out Fayard (2019). Michela Niccolai teaches the history of 19th century music and the history of opera staging at the Universities of Paris 4 and Paris 3.

Leon Plantinga graduated from Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1957. He received a M.Mus. in piano performance from Michigan State University in 1959, and a Ph.D. in the History of Music from Yale University in 1964. On the Yale faculty from 1963 until his retirement in 2005, Plantinga served as chair of the Department of Music for ten years. For six years in the 1990s, he was the Director of the Division of the Humanities. After retirement Plantinga spent a year at the Princeton Institute for Advance Study, and is currently Interim Director of the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments. He has written widely on music of the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, with books on Schumann as a music critic, a life and works study of Muzio Clementi, a history of nineteenth-century European music, and a study of the Beethoven concertos. Plantinga has published many articles and reviews in professional journals, and, lately, in the TLS of London.

Rudolf Rasch studied musicology in Amsterdam with Profs. Karel Philippus Bernet Kempers and Joseph Smits van Waesberghe. He wrote a dissertation on polyphonic carols in the Spanish Netherlands in the seventeenth century (Utrecht, 1985) and was affiliated to the Institute of Musicology of Utrecht University from 1977 until 2010, where he taught music theory, musical history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, musical history of the Netherlands and organology. He is still affiliated with Utrecht University as a guest researcher. His main research interests are the musical history of the Netherlands, tuning and temperament questions, and the works of composers such as Corelli, Vivaldi, Geminiani and Boccherini. He has published articles, books and editions in these fields, including Music Publishing in Europe 1600-1900 (a collection of essays edited, 2005), Driehonderd brieven over muziek (letters about music written by and to Constantijn Huygens, 2007), Understanding Boccherini’s Manuscripts (a collection of essays edited, 2014) and Muziek in de Republiek: Muziek en maatschappij in de Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden 1572-1795 (a detailed overview of musical life in the Dutc Republic, 2018). He is the editor of the Duetti per 2 Violini Op. 3 (2007), the Sonate per tastiera e violino Op. 5 (2009) and the Trii per 2 violini e violoncello Op. 1 (2014) in the complete critical edition of the works of Luigi Boccherini (2007, 2009, 2014). Since 2014 he is general editor of the Opera Omnia Francesco Geminiani, following up the work begun by Christopher Hogwood. Within this series he has edited the Sonate a violino, violone e cembalo Op. 1 (2015), the Concerti grossi after Corelli’s Sonatas Op. 5 (2017, with Christopher Hogwood) and the Guida armonica (2018, with Richard Maunders). He is general editor of the series Muziek uit de Republiek, published by the Royal Society for Dutch Music History, with editions of Dutch music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was on the board of the Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, the International Musicological Society and various other musicological organisations. He is a member of the editorial board of several musicological periodicals such as Ad Parnassum, the Revue Belge de Musicologie and the Journal of the Alamire Foundation. He likes playing the violin and the pianoforte as a dilettante.

Hailed for her “excellence, purity of voice and emotional intensity”, Sophie Louise Roland recently sang the roles of Dido and the Sorceress in Purcell’s Dido and Æneas and as Storge in Handel’s Jeptha with American Opera Theater (Baltimore, MD), Carmen and Suzuki with Ente Concerti Città di Iglesias, Cornelia in Giulio Cesare with Orchestra London, Maddelena in Verdi’s Rigoletto with Opera York (Ontario), Madama Butterfly’s Suzuki for Pellegrini Opera (Ottawa), Madonna Capuleti and Tebaldo in the International Opera Theater’s world premiere of Romeo e Giulietta in Città della Pieve (Italy), Carmen with both American Opera Theater and Opera Lirica Italiana, Nicklausse in Les Contes d’Hoffmann with Opera Brasov, as well as the title role in Carmen with both Janiec Opera Company and Indiana University Opera Theater. Dr. Roland currently holds the rank of Associate Professor of Music in the Don Wright Faculty of Music at the University of Western Ontario, where she is Chair of the Music Performance Studies Division. She is also the General Director of the both the Canadian Operatic Arts Academy and the Accademia Europea Dell’Opera.

Luca Lévi Sala PhD is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Manhattan College (NYC) and Visiting Scholar at New York University. He was Visiting Teaching Professor at Jagiellonian University in Cracow (2021) and at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2020-2021), former Professeur associé at Université de Montréal (2017-2020), Visiting Researcher at New York University (2017) and Visiting Research Fellow at Yale University (2015-2016). He has published a range of articles and chapters, reviews and reports (serving as peer-reviewer as well) in various international books and refereed journals, including Early Music, Journal of Musicological Research, Notes, Revue de musicologie, Studi musicali, Journal of Jewish Identities, Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, Ad Parnassum Journal, Studia Chopinowskie, Musica Jagellonica, Eighteenth-Century Music, Analecta Musicologica, Oxford Bibliographies Online, MGG, Grove Music Online. His book Music Criticism and Politics in the Italian Fascist State in the 1930s is committed is in preparation.

Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany, he is a member of the Italian National Edition of Luigi Boccherini's Complete Works and a charter member of the Centro Studi Opera omnia Luigi Boccherini. He is  Following his studies at Munich Academy of Music, he received his Ph.D. from the Munich University in 1984, with a dissertation on Boccherini's string quartets (Munich, Fink, 1987) and his Habilitation from the Tübingen University. In 1986 he discovered a twelfth Boccherini cello concerto in Naples, some cello Sonatas at the Abbey of Seitenstetten in Austria, and recently he found three new manuscripts of Concert Arias at the Biblioteca de la Catedral of Santiago de Compostela. He has contributed articles on Boccherini for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001) and for Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 2.

Jennifer Walker (Ph.D., Musicology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is an Assistant Professor of Musicology in the School of Music at West Virginia University. A scholar of French music during the late nineteenth century, her research reevaluates music’s role in the relationship between the French state and the Catholic church at the end of the nineteenth century. Her dissertation, “Sounding the Ralliement: Republican Reconfigurations of Catholicism in the Music of Third Republic Paris, 1880–1905,” was awarded the Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology.  She is the author of numerous essays and articles, including Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transformations of Catholicism in the Music of Third Republic Paris (AMS Studies in music/ Oxford University Press, 2021), “Church, State, and an Operatic Outlaw: Jules Massenet’s Hérodiade” (Cambridge Opera Journal, 2019) and “Les grands oratorios à l’église Saint-Eustache” (Journal of Music Criticism, 2019). Recent book chapters include “Les Drames sacrés and Sacred Drama: Armand Silvestre, Eugène Morand, and Charles Gounod on the Neo-Christian Stage” (La musique religieuse en France au XIXe siècle, ed. Nicolas Dufetel, Brepols, 2021) and “Biblical Boulevards: Sounding the Ralliement on Parisian Popular Stages (Sacred and Secular Intersections in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Markus Rathey and Eftychia Papanikolaou, Lexington Books, forthcoming 2022).