Theatro dei Cervelli (Theatre of the Brains!) is a recently created ensemble devoted to Renaissance and Early Baroque Italian music directed by musician and musicologist Andrés Locatelli. It reunites singers and instrumentalists of international provenance that share the same passion for the rediscovery of Italian sacred and secular music from ca. 1500-1650.  Our mission is to explore the interaction between thought, music and emotion from a historical perspective and through a careful study of historical performance, theory, and musical/textual traditions.

​

The ensemble's name is borrowed from Italian humanist Tommaso Garzoni (1549-1589), whose treatise Theatro de' vari e diversi cervelli mondani (1583) is one of the most curious early-modern attempts to describe and categorise the human mind and all the different personalities (called cervelli, cervellini, cervellazzi, etc.).

​

Here is a list of the various cervelli that have taken part in our productions so far:

​

Singers: Esther Labourdette, Delia Agúndez, Katarina Vukadinovic, Jacopo Facchini, Leandro Marziotte, Akinobu Ono, Roberto Rilievi, Marco Saccardin, Gabriele Lombardi, Gabriel Belkheiri, Lisa Ströckens, Carlos Negrín López, Alessandro Ravasio, Luca Mantovani, Maria Clara Maiztegui, Martha Rook, Lorenzo Tosi, Marie Theoleyre, Lina López, Annalisa Mazzoni.

​

Instrumentalists: Lina Manrique, Claudia Combs, Jaume Guri Batlle, Andrés Murillo Aydillo, Margherita Pupulin, Ryoko Katayama, Marta Graziolino, Diana Fazzini, Flora Papadopoulos, Miguel Rincón Rodríguez, Cristiano Gaudio, Michal Gondko, Corina Marti, Sabina Colonna-Preti, Carolina Egüez, Bianca Cucini, Bruno Hurtado Gosalvez, Julio Caballero, Hermann Schreiner, Giulia Manfredini, Leon Jänicke.

​

Collaborations: prof Anthony M. Cummings (Lafayette College, Pennsylvania), prof Eugenio Refini (New York University - Casa Italiana, NYC), Jeffrey Döring (Goldstaub, Leipzig-Stuttgart).