David Guido Pietroni

Ever since he was a boy David Pietroni has been fascinated by music and started working as a promoter and tour manager for important Italian and international singers. Among them we count Enrico Ruggeri, Massimo Di Cataldo, Gianluca Grignani, Biagio Antonacci, Marco Masini and Eros Ramazzotti. After 15 years of personal and professional satisfactions, David Pietroni shifted his attention to the movies, trying to combine his passion for the two arts into one single job. The opportunity to have music and the movies meet arrived thanks to his collaboration with Compay Segundo, protagonist of one of the most important movie and home video music projects of all times: Buena Vista Social Club produced by Ry Cooder and directed by Wim Wenders with masterly skill. After exploring for a long time the most important music places of the Caribbean island, David Pietroni came back to Italy and devoted him to new artistic languages between music and the movies which will go with him from now on. The great opportunity arrived in 2002 thanks to the "Arturo Toscanini Foundation". David Pietroni is the producer of Rigoletto, directed by Vittorio Sgarbi and with costumes by Vivienne Westwood. Represented in the Campo Square in Siena with an audience of thirty two thousand people, Rigoletto is the biggest Italian opera event of that year. From the live shooting of the show the opera DVD entitled "Rigoletto Story" is obtained, which becomes a world case. Presented at the Venice Screenings within the Venice Biennale in 2004, the DVD is distributed at world level exclusively by Columbia TriStar and Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. This little masterpiece has obtained two nominations to the Grammy Awards in the categories "Best Surround Sound" and "Best Long For Music Video", having David Pietroni become voting member of the Recording Academy. Before starting new theater projects, David Pietroni devoted some months to an extremely important event for both fashion and art. In co-operation with the London's Victoria and Albert Museum, he organized and produced the personal show of the renowned English fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, which took place at the Palazzo Reale of Milan. The show was held for more than five months registering a record of public in the city of Milan. In 2007/2008 David Pietroni works with the Alderman for Culture of Milan Mr. Vittorio Sgarbi, with whom he has been collaborating since 1990. Together with the critic he has planned the season of the Arcimboldi Theater in Milan, the prestigious theater which has hosted the shows of the Scala Theater for three years, during its restoration works. Thanks to an extraordinary program, that year the Arcimboldi Theater became, together with the Scala Theater, the main protagonist of culture and entertainment in Milan. More than 170 shows, a world preview and thirty national first performances, among which the 16 performances of the musical "Cats" in the original edition by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Italian debuts of Richard O'Brien's "The Rocky Horror Show", the "9 Beethoven's symphonies" conducted by Lorin Maazel and co-produced by the Toscanini Symphonic Orchestra and Peter Stein interpreting a grand text like Faust. Among the famous musical events strongly wanted by David Pietroni in the same year in Milan we can count the unforgettable performances of the rock legends Neil Young and Lou Reed, the great Tom Waits and Goran Bregovic and the extraordinary Lenny Kravitz closing concert at the Arena in Milan. Once the theater season closed, David Pietroni starts programming, always with Mr. Sgarbi, the first edition of MiTo, the International Music Festival of Milan and Turin, one of the most important European musical events. In September 2007 the air of Milan resounds with the seven notes and in less than one month almost 200 concerts are held in the two cities. The first performance takes place in Milan with Zubin Mehta on the stage together with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Sgarbi left his post as Alderman for Culture of Milan to become first Mayor of Salemi and then Manager of the Venice Museums. After 20 years of cooperation with the art critic and politician David Pietroni too decides to start a new artistic way and renew his great love for music observing it under the eye of the director. He has been studying for more than two years in the laboratories of the greatest experts of special effects in the world. After a long activity of research and experimentation, he possesses the skills to bring the secrets of 3D animation movies as well as the best special effects to the theater sets. For the bicentennial of Giuseppe Verdi's birth and on the occasion of the Verdi celebrations in 2013 he is preparing to present two new great events to the public: Nabucco and Trovatore. Cared for in even the slightest detail, rich in special effects "taken" from the movies these two Verdi masterpieces will come out in small and big theaters all around the world to give unforgettable emotions to the public. During the intense period from 2006 to 2007 David Pietroni became member of the prestigious Tribeca Film Center, the production center wanted by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal. The Center, established to support the new promises of American movie industry and the New York Film Community, becomes to him an opportunity which will radically change his artistic career. In 2006 David starts writing the musical comedy "The Chronicler of Broadway" of which he is also director and producer. It deals with Italian-American and Jewish gangsters and relates, through a "Chronicler", the myth of the roaring 20ies. Golden worlds made of gangsters who love, struggle, dream and destroy on the other side of the ocean. Stories that have created a myth which would dissolve in the space of a few years. It is directed and produced by David Pietroni and written together with Barbara Zucchi; costumes are designed by Vivienne Westwood, stage-designing is by the legendary Carlo Leva (art-director for Sergio Leone and Federico Fellini), choreography is by Bill Goodson (historical choreographer of the Moulin Rouge in Paris) and texts are by Pippo Kaballà (author of the lyrics for The Godfather's theme by Francis Ford Coppola). David Pietroni lives between Milan and Tel Aviv.