Andrea Secchi
Born in Colle Val d’Elsa (Siena), Andrea Secchi, upon completing classical secondary school, earned a diploma cum laude with special mention in Piano at Florence’s “Luigi Cherubini” Conservatory under the guidance of Giorgio Sacchetti. He attended the Master Courses held by Paul Badura-Skoda, Joaquín Achúcarro, and Maurizio Pollini at Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena. He studied with Andrea Lucchesini at Accademia Internazionale di Musica in Pinerolo and, for conducting, with Piero Bellugi.
He has performed in Italy and abroad, taking part in numerous concert cycles in Turin, Siena, Rome, Palermo, and Florence, at Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, at the Chopin Museum in Warsaw, and in Dublin, London, Munich, Kiel, Krakow, Beijing, Pretoria, and Tokyo; everywhere he has been, he has garnered hearty and universal accolades for his personality and interpretative passion. He has won more than twenty national and international competitions, also earning special prizes for the best interpretation of music by Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Schönberg, and Beethoven. In 2003, he was the top Italian at the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition, and debuted at Salle Cortot in Paris. Having always had an interest in the chamber repertoire, he belonged to the Quartetto Accademia from 2002 to 2006.
He is also vastly experienced in the opera repertoire. From 2006 to 2013 he was Altro Maestro of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino chorus, a position that allowed him to collaborate with some of the finest conductors, including Zubin Mehta, Seiji Ozawa, Lorin Maazel, Kurt Masur, Riccardo Chailly, Daniel Oren, and Semyon Bychkov. From 2013 to 2017 he was replacement chorus master and Altro Maestro of the chorus at Den Norske Opera & Ballett in Oslo.
As collaborating chorus master, he was invited to Staatsoper in Vienna and to Teatro Regio in Turin where, after an initial collaboration in 2012-2013, he has been Chorus Director since 2018. At this prestigious venue, he has devoted his efforts to works from the great opera repertoire and lesser-known ones like Korngold’s Violanta, or Agnese di Paer (a production that won the Abbiati prize), as well as masterpieces from the symphonic repertoire, from Brahms’s A German Requiem,to Mendelssohn’s Elias, and from Rossini’s Stabat Mater to Verdi’s Quattro Pezzi Sacri, working alongside such conductors as Riccardo Muti, Gianandrea Noseda, Fabio Luisi, and Daniele Gatti, and with the RAI National Symphony Orchestra.
Starting 2023/24 Season Andrea Secchi is the new Chorus Master of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia