Alberto Cara

Alberto Cara was born in Tivoli in 1975. He completed his piano studies with Eugenio Tani, Riccardo Risaliti and Boris Petrushansky, and studied composition with Federico Biscione, Alessandro Cusatelli, Marco Tutino and Luis Bacalov. He has composed symphonic, chamber and operatic works. In 2007, at Marco Tutino’s invitation, he wrote Il colore di Cenerentola, a metropolitan fairy tale in four scenes. The opera was co-produced by Turin’s Teatro Regio and Bologna’s Teatro Comunale, and premiered at the Piccolo Regio Laboratorio in Turin and L’Altrocomunale in Bologna during the 2007–2008 season. In 2009 he composed Gli occhi colore del vino, a monologue for actor and seven instruments, setting his own libretto freely adapted from Book X of Homer’s Odyssey. It was first performed by the I Pomeriggi Musicali ensemble in Milan. His chamber and symphonic works have been performed in Italy and abroad by I Pomeriggi Musicali, the Orchestra da Camera Fiorentina, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Sanremo and the Teatro dell’Opera Giocosa in Savona, and at the Brinkhall Summer Festival in Turku, Finland; the Gaulitanus Festival in Gozo, Malta; the Società dei Concerti G. Barattelli in L’Aquila; Rive Gauche in Turin; Rebus – Occhio al nuovo in Milan; and the International Saxophone Stage in Fermo.

An active arranger and orchestrator, he has re-orchestrated and adapted well-known operas for AsLiCo and the Teatro Sociale di Como to meet the requirements of the theatre and other regional venues. These projects include Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel in 2009, with a reduction of the original score and a metrical revision of the libretto; Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in a reduced version; Verdi’s Nabucco, co-produced in 2010 by the Teatro Sociale di Como and Teatro Regio di Torino; and Verdi’s Aida.

In 2013, Casa Musicale Sonzogno commissioned him to revise and re-orchestrate Francesco d’Avalos’s musical drama Maria di Venosa for the 40th anniversary of the Festival della Valle d’Itria in Martina Franca. In 2018, Da Vinci Classics released his album Symphonic Works, performed by I Pomeriggi Musicali.