Simone Rubino - Biography

Since winning the ARD-Musikwettbewerb competition in 2014, the Crédit Suisse Young Artists Award in 2016 and a BBT Fellowship in 2020, Simone Rubino has been engaging audiences with his performances as soloist, collaborator and creator. He is committed to bringing percussion to the heart of traditional repertoire, from Baroque to contemporary, and building bridges between styles, generations and ideas in all his creative encounters.

Premiering and commissioning original new works are important to his mission of innovation and experimentation; he has worked with composers such as Carlo Boccadoro, Avner Dorman, Adriano Gaglianello and Aziza Sadikov and premiered new works with the likes of NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, and Orchestra della Toscana. He is a regular guest at the major music festivals of Rheingau, Schwetzingen, Schleswig-Holstein, Lucerne and La Folle Journée in France and Japan and has performed as soloist with orchestras including Vienna Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Munich Philharmonic among many others. He has worked with conductors such as Tan Dun, Manfred Honeck, Zubin Mehta and Michael Sanderling and his chamber music partners include pianists Katia & Marielle Labèque and Beatrice Rana.

Il Ritmo della Terra was the first major project in which Simone brought not only his percussion instruments to the stage, but also his voice (counter-tenor). This led to another multi-disiplinary collaboration inspired by the Saint-Exupéry story and performed with children’s choir with original music by Peter Wittrich.

Born in Turin in 1993, Simone Rubino trained at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in his hometown with Riccardo Balbinutti and then with Peter Sadlo in Munich. Since 2019 he has been professor of percussion at the university of Music in Lausanne and visiting professor at Berlin University of the Arts.

Simone Rubino took part in BBT’s 20th anniversary celebrations in June 202, both at Bold Tendencies, Peckham in Kate Whitley and Multi-Story Orchestra’s Young Creatives’ Verified and at Wigmore Hall.

Read Simone Rubino’s #BBTathomeforawhile blog here

To me the Borletti Buitoni Trust is synonymous with Passion, Understanding, Courage, Support, Gratitude and Family.

Ever since I met BBT and got the fantastic news of becoming one of the BBT Fellowship winners 2020, a wonderful relationship has opened up with the team, which is always ready to contribute with passion and love to help the artist and make dreams become true.

As an artist I feel it is my responsibility to express and communicate, through art, moral values in which I strongly believe. Without art and culture man would lose his identity and his function in the world.

And it is for this reason that I admire and am extremely grateful to the Borletti-Buitoni Trust for supporting young artists and making this become an important mission.

Photographs by Simon Weir