CV

Luca Ferrini studied the piano with Prof. Giovanni Umberto Battel at the Giuseppe Tartini Conservatory in Trieste, graduating with honours in 1988, and then studied the harpsichord under the tutelage of Prof. Ilario Gregoletto at the Jacopo Tomadini Conservatory in Udine, graduating in 1996. In Udine, he also studied the organ and organ composition.

In 2025, forty years have passed since Ferrini began giving concerts, either as a soloist, in various chamber ensembles or with a range of orchestras and conductors, performing on the piano, the harpsichord and the organ with equal success in Slovenia, Europe and further afield. He has appeared in important concert halls such as the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, the Beijing Concert Hall, Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Cankarjev dom and the Slovenian Philharmonic in Ljubljana, Musikverein in Vienna, the National Concert Hall in Dublin, the National Theatre of Malta, the Seoul National University, the Philharmonics in Odesa, Kaunas and Ulaanbaatar, and the Saint-Michel Theatre in Brussels, as well as in Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Zagreb, Belgrade, Madrid, Porto, Copenhagen, Brisbane, Melbourne, Hobart, Buenos Aires, Chile and elsewhere.

He has collaborated with renowned Slovenian and foreign musicians, including many top names from the international music scene, as well as soloist and orchestral musician with conductors like Arkadij Steinlucht (Russia), René Gulikers (Netherlands), Carl Davis and Simon Robinson (England), David de Villiers, Lior Shambadal and Jürgen Bruns (Germany), Tõnu Kalliuste (Estonia), En Shao (China), Steven Loy (USA) and Anton Nanut, Uroš Lajovic, Marko Letonja, Marko Munih, Marko Gašperšič and Simon Krečič from Slovenia.

Ferrini is a member of various chamber groups of early music, such as Ensemble Nova Academia, Ensemble Claviere and I Musici della Serenissima, and is a co-founder and member of various other ensembles and groups for contemporary music: Ensemble MD7 (with which he received the inaugural Lipovšek Prize of the Society of Slovene Composers in 2013), Neophonia, Ensemble Dissonance, the Society of Slovene Composers Chamber Orchestra and others. In all of these different capacities, he has performed more than 180 new compositions to date.

He has recorded for various European music labels and RTV houses (Italian RAI, Russian State Radio, Hungarian Radio, Slovenian RTV, Croatian HRT, Makedonian MRT, Romanian Radio, Medici-TV, private radio and television stations) and has released more than forty compact discs as a pianist, harpsichordist and organist. Among the recordings for piano, the CD for solo piano Prebujenje – Awakening featuring music by living Slovenian composers has been recently released by the Society of the Slovene composers. Particular mention should be made of his interpretations of Liszt’s late piano works, which were released by the Slovenian record label Helidon and distributed as a supplement to the Italian national magazines Il Giornale della Musica and Classic Voice (produced by the Liszt Institute in Bologna), as well as the piano quintets by Alfred Schnittke, Petr Eben and Primož Ramovš, which he recorded with the Ljubljana String Quartet (RivoAlto label). In a duo with clarinettist Jože Kotar, Ferrini released a series of compact discs entitled Music from the Islands for the Faroese label Tutl, which received excellent reviews in the American magazine The Clarinet. His most notable recordings as a harpsichordist are the sonatas for violin and basso continuo by Giuseppe Tartini and his pupils, performed in a duo with violinist Črtomir Šišković (almost forty sonatas for which Ferrini arranged the continuo part himself) and released by the Italian label Dynamic.

Ferrini has received excellent international references and reviews for his playing, which have been published in Austria, Italy, Malta, Germany, Russia, Slovenia, France, USA and so on.

He serves as an ‘official’ piano accompanist at international masterclasses, academies and competitions for various musical instruments: Denmark – Carl Nielsen International Competition, China – Beijing International Music Competition, Mexico – Henry Szeryng International Violin Competition, Belgium – Kortrijk (now Ghent) International Clarinet Competition, as well as other events in Italy, Slovenia, Austria and Poland. Ferrini’s work as an accompanist is particularly valued by clarinettists, and he is the official pianist of the ClarinetFest festivals, organised by the International and European Clarinet Associations (the ICA and the ECA), which has given him an opportunity to perform with clarinettists of virtually all generations from all over the world.

Ferrini is active as a composer and has written various instrumental and choral works that are performed throughout Europe. He also works as an organiser of concert events (for two decades he was the artistic director and organiser of the Opicina Musical Meetings in Opicina near Trieste), as well as organising international workshops for the harpsichord and the piano.

He has taught at the conservatories in Brescia and Salerno, as well as at the Klagenfurt Conservatory and the Ljubljana Conservatory of Music and Ballet. He currently serves as an accompanist at the Ljubljana Academy of Music, as well as teaching the piano, the harpsichord and chamber music the Art Grammar School in Koper.