Lorenza Borrani, Leader/Director

Lorenza Borrani has been Leader/Director of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe since 2008. Her work with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Lorenzo Coppola inspired her love and knowledge of period performance practice. Her encounters with Lorin Maazel and Symphonica Toscanini, Claudio Abbado and Orchestra Mozart, where she also performed as a soloist, shaped her musical ideas and interests. As a soloist, she has collaborated with Trevor Pinnock, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Bernard Haitink.

As a chamber musician, Lorenza has collaborated with artists such as Kristian Bezuidenhout, András Schiff, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Janine Jansen and Daniel Hope, and she often plays in a duo with Alexander Lonquich. Lorenza is one of the founders of Spunicunifait which is dedicated to playing and recording Mozart’s string quintets works. The group is currently recording for the Alpha label and performances are scheduled at Bremen Festspiele and London’s Wigmore Hall.

Lorenza is one of the co-founders of Spira mirabilis, a laboratory for the preparation and performance of orchestral and chamber music repertoire of all periods, which works without a conductor or a leader. Their projects have included full opera of Nozze di Figaro, Beethoven’s Symphony No.9, fragments from Mozart’s Così fan tutte and the premiere of Colin Matthew’s Spiralling, in Aldeburgh. 

Lorenza studied with Alina Company, Piero Farulli, Zinaida Gilels and Pavel Vernikov at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, and took the postgraduate course at the Kunstuniversität Graz with Boris Kuschnir. She is a Professor of Violin at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole and has been a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London since 2019.

The Leader/Director Chair is supported by Ms Dasha Shenkman.

Listen to Lorenza on Interlude, the COE’s podcast.