by the Melos Chorus
First chapter of a three-part portrait. The life, the craft and the oddities of a cellist who writes his own repertoire.
Palermo, 24 October 1962. In the Sollima household, music already has a fixed address: the father, Eliodoro, born in Marsala in 1926, is a composer and teaches composition at the Vincenzo Bellini Conservatory. The son grows up among his papers and comes out with two diplomas from the same institution, cello with Giovanni Perriera and composition with his father. It is a legacy Giovanni has never hidden: even today, in his duo recitals, you may find an Aria by Eliodoro, written in 1945, on the programme next to Beethoven.
The career starts from the repertoire, as it should, and soon spreads in every direction. Sollima has played with Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Muti, Martha Argerich, Yo-Yo Ma, Katia and Marielle Labèque, Yuri Bashmet; with the Chicago Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw, the Budapest Festival Orchestra; and with the other half of the world, Patti Smith, Stefano Bollani, Paolo Fresu. His first record under his own name, Aquilarco, came out in 1998 on Point Music, produced by Philip Glass. A dozen more followed, for Sony, Egea and Decca.
In his hands, the cello has been played in the Sahara Desert, underwater and carved from ice.
The list of venues says a lot about the man. Alice Tully Hall and Carnegie Hall in New York, Wigmore Hall in London, the Salle Gaveau in Paris, La Scala, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, the Sydney Opera House; and alongside them the Knitting Factory, the club of New York’s experimental scene. Then the places a concert hall cannot offer: the Sahara, a concert underwater, and the ice cello built by the sculptor Tim Linhart, the subject of the 2021 documentary N-Ice Cello. An instrument that plays for as long as the temperature allows, and then turns back into water.
Sollima the composer follows the same logic. He writes for theatre and for film, for Peter Greenaway, John Turturro, Bob Wilson, Carlos Saura, Marco Tullio Giordana, Peter Stein, Karole Armitage, Carolyn Carlson. In 2002 the Teatro Massimo in Palermo staged his opera Ellis Island; in 2020 Il Libro della Giungla and Acqua profonda had their premieres; in 2023 came the soundtrack to Antonio Albanese’s Cento domeniche. In 2007 the video for Sogno ad occhi aperti, animated by the Norwegian Lasse Gjertsen, went around the web. In 2015 he signed the sonic logo of Expo Milano and played at the inauguration of the new museum housing Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà.
He also writes a great deal for his colleagues. His best-known piece, Violoncelles, vibrez!, has become a classic for anyone who plays the instrument, from conservatory ensembles to great soloists. His programmes make room for a Beethoven sonata, Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir and System of a Down’s Chop Suey!, and heard live the mix has a coherence you would never guess on paper: the same physical energy, the same bow biting into the string.
Since 2010 he has taught at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, which has named him an Academician.
Part of the biography lives in the archives. Sollima has brought back to light the music of Giovanni Battista Costanzi, an eighteenth-century Roman cellist, whose sonatas and sinfonias he has recorded for the Glossa label: a forgotten composer who sounds again thanks to a colleague born two and a half centuries later, and whose story Melos will soon tell. In October 2018 the Amsterdam Cello Biennale gave him the Anner Bijlsma Award. He plays a cello by Francesco Ruggieri, built in Cremona in 1679.
In 2012, at the occupied Teatro Valle, he founded 100 Cellos with Enrico Melozzi, an orchestra open to anyone who plays the cello, and in 2013 and 2014 he was artistic director of La Notte della Taranta. That Roman night in 2012 is where a story of friendship and shared stages with the Orchestra Notturna Clandestina begins, and it is the subject of the second instalment of this portrait. The third will go back three centuries, to Costanzi and to a Rome that loved outsized music.
On Sunday 15 November Giovanni Sollima is a guest at The Classical Rave Party, the evening that closes Romaeuropa Festival 2026 in the Sala Santa Cecilia of the Auditorium Parco della Musica Ennio Morricone, in collaboration with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. That same morning, in the same building, the 100 Cellos play. Tickets at romaeuropa.net, TicketOne and Vivaticket.