Teodoro Baù’s Spotify playlist

Spotify Teodoro Bau

Teodoro Baù, win­ner of MA Competition 2021, shares his favorite music with the audi­ence of MA Festival. In his playlist he also wants to include the music that inspired and influ­enced him through­out his musi­cal career.

Enjoy this and oth­er playlists curat­ed by mem­bers of the MA fam­i­ly on the MA Festival Spotify chan­nel and read Teodoro Baù’s full sto­ry on mafes​ti​val​.be.

In this playlist I want­ed to col­lect not only the music I like the most, but espe­cial­ly every­thing that has had a strong impact on my musi­cal growth. All the pieces and artists in this list have a strong and deep mean­ing for me.
The lute was my first instru­ment and I start­ed play­ing it as a child. I still remem­ber when my par­ents took me to a Hopkinson Smith con­cert in Vicenza, per­haps one of the first pro­fes­sion­al con­certs I attend­ed. It was a rev­e­la­to­ry expe­ri­ence. At the end of the con­cert, my par­ents gave me the record in which Hopkinson Smith plays Kapsberger, and I even man­aged to get his auto­graph. I lis­tened to this record count­less times, and I still keep it as some­thing very precious.
The next piece is a trib­ute to my lute teacher, the teacher who accom­pa­nied me for the longest time, Massimo Lonardi. I includ­ed the lis­ten­ing of a fan­ta­sy by Francesco da Milano, his favourite author.
After a few years play­ing the lute, I start­ed play­ing the vio­la da gam­ba, an instru­ment with which I found an imme­di­ate affin­i­ty. As always in life, luck plays a very impor­tant role, and one of my for­tunes was to have found extra­or­di­nary teach­ers, all very dif­fer­ent. I am grate­ful to each of them and want to ded­i­cate a piece in this playlist to them: Claudia Pasetto and Alberto Rasi (Cima), Paolo Pandolfo (Abel), Vittorio Ghielmi (Marais).
Next, I want to add to this col­lec­tion four oth­er musi­cal fig­ures that have been touch­stones for me: Sophie Watillon, for her grace, so light and bright. Pedro Memelsdorff, for the fine chis­el work he puts into every note. The Giardino Armonico, an incom­pa­ra­ble sound mod­el, and Giuliano Carmignola, mas­ter of cantabile and legato.
I always had a fas­ci­na­tion for a cer­tain type of voic­es. It was dif­fi­cult to choose two exam­ples but here they are: Sara Mingardo and Fritz Wunderlich.
Finally, I would like to end this playlist with four pieces that can tell the sto­ry of my cur­rent activ­i­ty: first, La Fonte Musica. Exactly 10 years ago, Michele Pasotti put a fid­dle in my hands to play that very bizarre music. I am very grate­ful to this group, with whom we have lived moments of great inten­si­ty in the last 10 years. Here is a small excerpt from the mon­u­men­tal work we com­plet­ed in 2018, the record­ing of the com­plete Zacara da Teramo, a work that took us half a year, between rehearsals, con­certs and recording.
Next, anoth­er group with whom we do far too few con­certs, Le Girandole Armoniche. The work with Esther Crazzolara and Federica Bianchi starts from a won­der­ful syn­er­gy that brought us to work togeth­er since 2012, the same year in which I start­ed work­ing with La Fonte Musica, and in which I also met Andrea Buccarella (so many things hap­pened in 2012!), with whom I play reg­u­lar­ly in duo. No record­ings of the two of us are avail­able yet (they will be com­ing soon 😉), but I want to add to this playlist a piece from his album Toccata”. Andrea is a musi­cian like few oth­ers, with an incred­i­ble musi­cal aware­ness that you can hear clear­ly in this piece.
Finally, a record­ing in which I play dou­ble bass. It has been an impor­tant part of my edu­ca­tion and I have learned a lot since I start­ed study­ing it around 2014 (and, I must say, it has also been impor­tant for my eco­nom­ic sur­vival in the past years). Here you can find an aria that I par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed record­ing, togeth­er with my friends from the ensem­ble Los Elementos. — Teodoro Baù