Hrvatski

Mazzoleni, Francesco | percussion

Date created: 02.06.2021.
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FRANCESCO MAZZOLENI was born in 1992 in Venice. He studied piano and clarinet since childhood, and afterwards percussion. After his studies at the Vicenza Conservatory under Saverio Tasca, he studied at the Zagreb Academy of Music under Ivana Kuljerić Bilić, where he also worked with Igor Lešnik.

Francesco participated in numerous percussion masterclasses and festivals: Percussion Friends (Amsterdam), International Katarzyna Mycka Academy (Hannover), KALIMA - Keiko Abe Lausanne Marimba Academy (Lausanne), Ensemble Modern (Innsbruck), Ivana Bilić Marimba Week (Samobor). He appeared at festivals such as the Palermo Classica, Percussion Festival Ankara and Umago Classica.

In 2018 he won the Zagreb Academy of Music Dean’s Award. The same year, he held a marimba masterclass at the Croatian Music Youth’s International Cultural Centre in Grožnjan.

He is currently a member of the percussion section of the Croatian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra.

During his studies, he started the Flam-a Duo with his colleague Luis Camacho Montealegre. After winning second prizes at the IV Percute Competition in Valencia in 2016 and the Universal Marimba Competition in Belgium in 2017, the duo has performed at numerous festivals such as the Ivana Summer Percussion Festival (Samobor, Croatia), Salotto Musicale (Treviso/Belluno, Italy), International Percussion Ensemble Week (Bjelovar, Croatia), Percussion Camp (Tenerife, Spain), Križevci Percussion Evenings (Križevci, Croatia) and Arte Entre Gigantes (Campo de Criptana, Spain), and as part of the Croatian Radio’s European project Art’s Birthday in 2018, which was broadcast by the European Broadcasting Union network.

They have premiered the works of Croatian composers written specifically for their duo and promoted the Zagreb Academy of Music new recording studios with several original videos. In 2020 they posted a series of videos Sunday at Soundbrick Studio on their YouTube channel featuring performances of classical pieces for marimba and vibraphone in their own arrangements.