Roberto Trainini was born into a non-musical family, in a deep south Italian town, Bari ,where culture and music were regarded mostly as a “waste of time” and football as “culture”.
He began his cello studies by chance at the age of 10 when his father’s uncle Saverio Lojacono (that was for 30 years principal and co-prinicpal cellist in Buenos Aires at Teatro Colon, Montevideo and Lima) returned from South America and asked if Roberto would like to try to play: since then, cello never left his side anymore.
Young Roberto was trained by Vincenzo Caminiti and Pietro Bruno in Bari and won all first prizes in the two major national cello competitions for students in Italy, but it was only at the age of 19 that the great Radu Aldulescu heard his playing and took him into his class to Switzerland to the International Menuhin Music Academy on a full scholarship. There he had the possibility of studying chamber music as well , with Lord Yehudi Menuhin and Walter Levin.
Roberto went on to study cello and chamber music with Michel Strauss, Steven Isserlis and Niklas Schmidt, but the biggest influence was his teacher and mentor in Hamburg, Wolfgang Mehlhorn (assistent of Antonio Janigro).
Despite all this good advices and several prizes in important international Cello Competitions ( Markneukirchen, Belgrad, Rome, Hamburg) Roberto remained an unknown principal cellist at a german opera house and later at the SSO Singapore for a short period of time until 2008, when his solo career took off with his debut in Iasi , Romania with the Dvorak Concerto under the baton of Maestro Santorsola.
He’s nowadays a regularly invited soloist in Poland, Germany, Austria, Turkey, South Africa, Romania, Cyprus,Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain.
At the present moment Roberto is cello professor at the Conservatorio "C. Monteverdi" in Bolzano/Italy and plays an Alessandro Ciciliati , Ferrara 2010 cello.
A passion of him is the re-discovery ( together with M. Santorsola) of the Italian Solo Repertoire of the XX Century, and the Castelnuovo-Tedesco Cello Concerto is part of this project. But this includes Respighi, Casella, Ghedini, Malipiero too.
Roberto furthermore studied and performed the Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Canticle of the Sun” - a cello concerto for solo, chamber choir , and percussion - with the composer herself in Germany.
Despite all his achievements he keeps the opinion (quote) that : “ ...competitions had nothing to do with music and expression, on the contrary they nowadays tend to kill every form of diversity in a frantic search of success, success that actually is not long lasting and leaves little traces in the heart of any audience”.
“......every piece has an intimate story to say, whatever should be; our goal is to tell, like modern bards, this stories: stories made up not of words, spaces and timing, but sounds and therefore emotions and subtle memories, the so called UNTOLD stories, in a language that really has no borders. If we keep to think that we must show to the audience how good or fast or BRAVO we are, then well we are out of track”.
Steven Isserlis once told him : “.....you never do what I say, you use only your head!”.
