Vito Palumbo is an award-winning, critically acclaimed Italian composer. He has had pieces performed all over the world, notably by the London, Helsingborg and Gävle Symphony Orchestras, the RAI National Symphony Orchestra, Oradea State Philharmonic, Norrbotten NEO, Athenäum-Quartett (Berliner Philharmoniker), AuditivVokal Dresden and Camerata Bern with Patricia Kopatchinskaja as soloist.
Palumbo began his career with postmodern experiments, later focusing on exploring the possibilities of the voice in different forms of music theatre. Works such as Butterfly, Cinque di Cuori, Il Catalogo, Sinforosa, La machine de sons, Comuni-Canti and Les Animaux bear witness to his research into voice emission and study of phonemes along with influences from his teachers Azio Corghi and Luciano Berio. His output in recent years has centred on large symphonic works for full orchestra. A number of solo concertos as well as his double concerto for guitar and marimba, Drops for harp and string orchestra, Fragile for electric guitar and string orchestra and Dark Clouds for orchestra represent Palumbo’s research on the extended possibilities of orchestral colours and textures, but also into the idea of interdependent musical moments, like a network of neural connections. In his most recent works, timbre as colour has led to a new idea, ‘sound-light’, which he explores with the help of electronics mixed with instrumental sounds and also by the use of extended techniques in his orchestral writing.
Having an interest in astronomy, Palumbo aims to find an abstract ‘core-sound’ in a single, large movement (most of his works are organized in separate movments), like the eternal cosmic energy of which we are but a small, isolated point.
