RICCARDO VINO
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BIO
Riccardo could read music before he could read words, but he came by his talent honestly: his grandfather, Angelo Ragazzini, was a renowned Italian violinist and composer. At the age of 5, Riccardo was accepted by the private studio of Lidia Proietti, the Director of the Conservatory of Martini in Bologna, to study classical piano. Despite the young age, when he was 10 he had received the music diploma in Solfeggio and Music of Theory as auditor at the Conservatory of Bologna, being the only under aged student of his class.
Having mastered the piano, Riccardo turned in his high school years to learning the violin and forming a variety of musical groups, where he began his passion for creating community through story and song and exploring the pop music.
Riccardo’s academic excellence continued in his university studies where he won a scholarship and was chosen by The Committee of the University of California Education Abroad Program to spend his senior year at the University of California at Santa Barbara studying economics, acting, and voice training. On his return to Italy, he was accepted into the School of Performing Arts in Milan "Quelli di Grock", where he
Photo By: Gregor Laubsch
focused on acting and music theatre. After his diploma, he took masterclasses and workshops with Juij Alschitz, Geraldine Baron (Actor’s Studio), Dominique de Fazio (Actor’s Studio), and Yoshi Oida.
Riccardo was driven to find new ways to make his extensive training in classical performance relevant, and began to envision ways to combine his classical training in music and theater with contemporary performance theory. Along with several other theater fellows, under the mentorship of Guido Tortorella, he founded a theater company called Fragments Theater intended to bring classic modern and contemporary literature ("Huis Clos" by J.P.Sartre) to the musical stage.
In 2005, Riccardo was accepted to the private studio of the vocal trainers Jacquiline Stujke and Annette Goeres, and moved to Berlin to pursue the rare opportunity to work with them intensely on vocal interpretation and performance. Riccardo was quickly able to find his feet and procure lucrative work, gaining accreditation also as a voice actor and working in English, Italian, and German with major agencies in Germany for TV, film, and advertising.
It was while he was far from home in Berlin that he began to revisit the themes of history and family that would define his career. On a visit back to Italy during the holidays, Riccardo discovered an old case of his grandfather’s original scores. From this find, he developed a series of shows that he would both direct and star in, titled Riccardo Vino & the Technicolors, Voglio Vivere Cosi (I want to live this way) and Swing al Dente. The shows are a light-hearted yet delicately weighty exploration of the haunting of history: Vino enchants his audience with dazzlingly versatile musical technique that holds moments of emotional intimacy, carrying them through three decades of Italian and family history. The show works through musical citation of the cross-pollination of Italian and American pop music that defined the 1930s-50s; gliding between the musical styling of American stars like Judy Garland and Fred Astaire and the post-war Italian fusion of classical and pop sounds.
Riccardo has toured with this show in Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland, often to sold-out venues sponsored by the European funds for culture.
His continuing work maintains his focus on historical and cultural fusion, and is carried forward in his project Hit’s Amore where he hybridizes American, British, and Italian pop, spanning six decades of musical style.
Riccardo Vino is currently working on his first solo album, a melody-driven collection of autobiographical songs for which he has written both lyrics and music.
