Curriculum Vitae

Lamberto is Head of Music Technology at Birmingham Conservatoire, a post he has held since 2000. Italian, born in Geneva in 1963, he read architecture and art history in Rome before studying music composition with Azio Corghi at Milan’s Conservatoire. He attended master classes with Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter and George Benjamin, and the 1-year Advanced Training Course for Young Composers of the Toscanini Academy in Parma, directed by Corghi. Of lasting influence were a series of journeys to remote areas of Colombia to record music and sounds of traditional Indian and mestizo communities.

In 1994 he began an extended collaboration with Luciano Berio, and two years later he joined Tempo Reale, the research centre for new technologies applied to music founded by Berio in Florence. He worked there as composer, teacher, performer and artistic coordinator. From 1997 to 1999 he was in charge of the music productions of the Centre, and directed the production of Berio’s works with electronics, including Ofanim (Carnegie Hall 1997 and Schleswig-Holstein Festival 1998), Outis (La Scala, Milan, and Châtelet, Paris) and Cronaca del Luogo (Salzburg Festival 1999). In 2000 he was invited by AGON, the Milan research and production centre, to work on interactive installations (Intercos at Bologna’s COSMOPROF) and educational projects (Suoni in Corso).

More recently Lamberto has been responsible for live electronics and sound design in a number of high profile performances with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (for Julian Anderson’s Book of Hours in 2007), Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Athelas Sinfonietta and Den Nye Opera in Bergen (for Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin in 2008).

Since arriving in Birmingham Lamberto has been developing a wide range of activities and resources to integrate new technologies with composition and performance. From 2001 to 2005 he directed he Thallein Ensemble, a group of advanced students devoted to new music, promoting the performance of new works and existing repertoire with live electronics. Works by Blondeau, Colombo Taccani, Corghi, Fedele, Jodlowski, Leroux, Romitelli are among the many UK premieres by the ensemble. In 2003 he created the Conservatoire’s Centre for Composition and Performance with Technology, collaborating on performance and research projects with Jonathan Harvey (the modernisation of his older works that use obsolete technology), Julian Anderson (the electronics of Book of Hours, winner of the 2006 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for large-scale composition) and Luca Francesconi (a new version of the multi-media work Lips Eyes Bang) among others. In 2004 he supervised the renovation of the Conservatoire’s Recital Hall, a unique space for the performance of multimedia and live electronics works. Lamberto has designed and developed two new joint courses: the BSc Music Technology (2001) in partnership with TIC, the Technology Innovation Centre, and the MA Digital Arts in Performance (2007) in partnership with BIAD, the Birmingham Institute of Arts and Design.

His music has been performed in Italy and abroad: Milano Musica, Nuova Consonanza Festival in Rome, Novecentomusica in Florence, Music Xtra Festival in the UK. Gabriele Cassone, the renowned trumpet player, commissioned in 1997 Antidotes: Red-earth, for natural trumpet and live electronics. In 1998 a CIDIM commission (Italian National Music Committee), and a joint production of Lugo’s Rossini Theatre, Parma’s Theatre and Toscanini Foundation brought to the stage Magma or the see-through wilderness, an opera on a text by Sebastian Schloessingk for actors, singers, orchestra and live electronics. More recent works include Touch, for piano and live electronics, river teach me, for soprano and string quartet, selected for the 2003 SPNM shortlist, Flectar, for trombone and live electronics, written for David Purser, and Alúna, for viola, ensemble and live electronics, written for Rivka Golani. Lamberto has worked with a number of directors, from Italy and elsewhere, writing music for theatre plays, documentaries and fiction films.

Lamberto is currently project manager of Integra: Fusing Music and Technology, a 3-year, €1,9M project supported by the Culture 2007-2013 programme of the European Union. Started in 2008 as the continuation of Integra – A Composition and Performance Environment for Sharing Live Music Technologies, another €1.2M Culture 2000 funded project, Integra focuses on dissemination and sustainability of live electronic music through a wide range of artistic, scientific and educational activities involving five research centres (Birmingham Conservatoire, Muzyka Centrum, IEM, NOTAM and Malmö Academy of Music) and five new music ensembles (BIT20 Ensemble, Court-circuit, Ensemble Ars Nova, Grup Instrumental de València and Athelas Sinfonietta) across Europe, plus CIRMMT (McGill University) in Canada. As the first coordinated effort among scientific and artistic partners to create a software-based environment for composing, performing and preserving music with live electronics in a user-friendly and reliable way, Integra is quickly attracting international attention.

Papers and articles relating to current research include Modernising live electronics technology in the works of Jonathan Harvey [ICMC Proceedings, Barcelona 2005], Modernising musical works involving Yamaha DX based synthesis: a case study [Organised Sound, vol 11 no 3, December 2006], both written in collaboration with J. Bullock, A novel approach to music with live electronics [Nordic Sounds, No. 4 December 2006], Sustainability of live electronic music in the Integra project [Melecon IEEE Proceedings, Ajaccio 2008] with J. Bullock and H. Frisk, and Towards a humane graphical user interface for live electronic music [NIME Proceedings, Pittsburgh 2009].