Coen Andrea
Andrea Coen was born in Rome on 22 November 1960. He earned his harpsichord diploma at the Royal College of Music in London and a degree in Humanities, with a major in musicology, at the Sapienza University of Rome.
One of the first in Italy to take an interest in the performance practice of early keyboard instruments, he gives concerts all over the world as a harpsichordist, organist and fortepianist for the most prestigious musical institutions.
He has recorded for EMI, Denon, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Musicaimmagine Records, Dynamic, Bongiovanni, Stradivarius and Naïves, as well as for leading Italian and international radio and television broadcasters. He has worked with renowned soloists, conductors and chamber ensembles including Aris Christofellis, Christopher Hogwood, Monica Huggett, Ann Hallenberg, Sara Mingardo, Emma Kirkby, Anton Steck, Antonio Pappano, Fabio Biondi, Trevor Pinnock, the Cappella Musicale di San Giacomo, Ensemble Seicentonovecento, L’Arte dell’Arco, Odhecaton, Modo Antiquo, the Collegium pro Musica and I Solisti Italiani, and with the actresses Ottavia Piccolo, Monica Guerritore and Galatea Ranzi.
His main publications include the critical edition of the complete keyboard Sonatas and of the Sextets with piano by D. Cimarosa, the “Intavolatura di Ancona” (1644), and the intermezzi “Don Chisciotte” by G. B. Martini, staged in the 1992-93 season of the “Concerti Italcable” at the Teatro Sistina in Rome. He edited the organ, piano and vocal works in the Opera Omnia of Muzio Clementi (of which he is a member of the Scientific Committee), published by Ut Orpheus in Bologna. He sits on the Advisory Board of the half-yearly journal Ad Parnassum (Journal of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music). With M. A. Cancellaro he published the first modern diplomatic-interpretative edition (8 volumes) of Benedetto Marcello’s Estro poetico-armonico, also for Ut Orpheus.
He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Fondazione “Le Colonne del Decumano” and artistic advisor to the Istituto Musicaimmagine in Rome. Since 2001 he has been a member of the Société de l’Orchestre de Sion. From 1986 to 2000 he contributed to the music programmes of Radio Rai, and in 2011 he worked as a consultant for RAI - Nuovi Media. Recently, after two years as an author for RAI Radio Classica, he was commissioned to create the podcast Diapason. Piccola enciclopedia degli strumenti musicali (a short encyclopedia of musical instruments), published on RaiPlay Sound. He produced the complete series of the television programme Anteprima Note & Teatri for Stream TV (now SKY) as curator and presenter, and has worked with Vatican Radio. In 1993 he received the “Chiave d’oro” (Golden Key) of the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma for artistic merit.
In 2001 he was invited to sit on the international jury of the Premio Bonporti in Rovereto, chaired by Gustav Leonhardt. During 2002 he performed unpublished organ and piano works by M. Clementi in Freiburg, Zurich, Sion, Leeds, Zaragoza, Los Angeles, Parma and Rome. In March 2007 he was invited by Leon Plantinga and Malcolm Bilson to give concerts and lectures at Yale University and Cornell University. In 2008 he presented his recital Italian keyboards thorough History at Fitzwilliam College (University of Cambridge). In 2009 he received the Premio Cimarosa Città di Aversa, and in 2010 he joined the Brilliant Classics catalogue with 3 CDs devoted to the first complete recording of the Sonatas by L. Giustini da Pistoia, played on a Cristofori instrument, and the CPO catalogue with organ works by A. Scarlatti.
His recent discography for Brilliant includes many other CDs devoted to D. Scarlatti’s sonatas for viola d’amore and harpsichord, the complete 36 Fantasias for harpsichord by Telemann and the first complete recording of C. P. E. Bach’s variations for fortepiano. After Telemann’s Kleine Kammermusik (first modern version for solo harpsichord), the same label released in 2021 Telemann’s 100 Minuets for harpsichord, in their first complete modern performance. In 2022 came the new recording of G. B. Vitali’s Artificii Musicali op. XIII (Modena, 1689), also a first complete modern recording, enhanced by Riccardo Cimino’s sound shaping and made with the latest audio technology.
His most significant engagements include an acclaimed recital at Tokyo Opera City, a lecture-concert on the transition from harpsichord to piano at the Ravenna Festival, the jury of the “Gotifredo Ferrari” International Fortepiano Competition in Rovereto (1st and 2nd editions), a week as visiting artist at the Butler School of Music of the University of Texas at Austin, two Vivaldi tours of Mexico with Modo Antiquo (Federico M. Sardelli), and a solo concert and masterclass at The International Conservatory Week Festival at the Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory in Saint Petersburg. In 2015 he gave a “Cristofori” solo recital at the Innsbruck Festival, returning in August 2017 with J. A. Benda’s melodrama Ariadne auf Naxos.
From 2013 to 2022, directly appointed by H. E. Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, Andrea Coen was one of the lay members of the Working Group for Sacred Music of the Pontifical Council for Culture throughout its activity, taking part as organiser, speaker and performer in four major international conferences. His most notable pre-pandemic engagements include an acclaimed South American tour with the programme Cercar l’affetto, devoted to the Italian harpsichord schools of the seventeenth century, with concerts and masterclasses, and several concerts in Italy and Europe for the anniversaries of Leonardo da Vinci and Primo Levi.
When activities resumed, in 2021 he worked as harpsichordist and music consultant for Paolo Virzì’s film Siccità, whose soundtrack won the Soundtrack Stars Award at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. In the same year, with his son Edoardo and bass-baritone Mauro Borgioni, he starred in an acclaimed programme he devised for the 700th anniversary of Dante, staged in Luxembourg, Amsterdam, Lima, Budapest and Belluno. In autumn 2022 the duo Coen & Coen devoted its now customary European mini tour to readings of Pier Paolo Pasolini with unpublished nineteenth-century transcriptions of J. S. Bach, for the centenary of the death of the great Friulian intellectual. In 2023 he created a reading concert inspired by Italo Calvino’s trilogy “Our Ancestors”, with unpublished harpsichord music by Merula, Cimarosa and Traetta.
In November 2023 Andrea Coen completed a tour of concerts and masterclasses in Lima, ending the year with Handel’s Messiah under John Nelson with the orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. His 2024 engagements included a concert at the Monteverdi Festival in Cremona with I Bassifondi, a programme of unpublished works by Charles Haenni at the Festival Flatus in Sion (CH), a reading concert for the Resonare fibris series at the MNSM in Rome and two organ recitals in Gdańsk. At the Accademia di Santa Cecilia he played the organ in Bach’s Mass in B minor conducted by R. Goebel (2024) and in Bruckner’s Great Mass No. 3 in F minor conducted by A. Pappano (2025).
His latest Brilliant Classics CD presents a rare early twentieth-century version for piano four hands of Bach’s Orgelbüchlein by H. Friedrich, Bach’s successor as Kantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, played on a rare historical piano by the renowned firm Kaps (Dresden, 1912). In 2025, the year of I Bassifondi’s Scarlatti tour, he curated for the fifth year running the music for the Lenten meetings of the Cardinal Vicar at the Basilica of San Giovanni in Rome, accompanying a series of lectures on Dante by Prof. Franco Nembrini with his own organ intabulation of motets by Guillaume de Machaut.