Umberto Clerici

• Cellist

Biography

Umberto Clerici attended the courses of Mario Brunello at the “Romano Romanini Foundation” in Brescia, and of David Gèringas in Fiesole. He took part at master classes with Georg Faust, Steven Isserlis (in Kronberg), Julius Berger (Mozarteum Salzburg). In April of 1999 he made his debut as soloist playing Haydn’s D Major cello concerto in Japan. Afterwards he performed with many orchestras including “I Pomeriggi Musicali” in Milan, The Orchestra of Rome, the Tuscany Regional Orchestra, Turin Philharmonic, Zagreb Soloist, Orchestra da Camera di Mantova, “Haydn” Orchester of Trento and Bozen, Symphony Orchestras of Istanbul, Ankara, Bursa and the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra collaborating with conductors like Keri-Lynn Wilson, Lu Jia, Dimitri Sitkovetzki, Jean Bernard Pommier, Barry Wordsworth, Ola Rudner and Lukas-Peter Graf.
He is the soloist in residence of Turin Philharmonic. He recorded a CD of the Saint-Saens cello concerto n°1 for RS label and in 2006 a new cd has been released together with “Amadeus” Magazine with all the compositions for cello and orchestra by Tchaikovsky and the First concerto by Shostakovich. In July of 2003 he received a very prestigious prize in Florence called “Galileo 2000” together with the famous Italian violinist Uto Ughi and the Nobel prize-winner for Peace Simon Peres.
In August he performed at the Salzburg Festspiele as winner of the Mozarteum prize. In 2005 he als received the “Pressenda” prize for the best young soloist of the year. He serves as the assistant teacher at Julius Berger’s class in the Summer Academy of Salzburg Mozarteum and in the Hochschule fur Musik of Augsburg and Nurnberg (Germany). In February 2005 he made his solo debut in New York at the Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall. Next year, among many appearances, he will debut with the Philarmonia Wien (Saint-Saens cello concerto) at the Grosser Saal of Musik Verein in Vienna and with the Brighton Philarmonic (Elgar cello concerto).Beginning in his early youth, he has partipated in several chamber music groups and he collaborated with a number of famous musicians including Pavel Vernikov, Enrico Pace, Sergej Krilov, Massimo Quarta, Marco Rizzi, Mario Brunello, Enrico Dindo, String quartet of La Scala Theatre and composers like Sofia Gubaidulina and Viktor Suslin. Since April of 2001 he plays with the “Turin Piano Trio”.

He plays a Giovan Battista Guadagnini cello (Turin 1769) that belonged to the famous Italian cellist Antonio Janigro.