Danilo Prefumo
Biography [ versione italiana ]
Danilo Prefumo focuses primarily on the study of 18th- and 19th-century European instrumental music, with a particular interest in the works of Niccolò Paganini, the Sammartini brothers, and Franz Schubert, to whom he has dedicated essays and articles that have appeared in "Rivista musicale italiana," "Rivista italiana di musicologia," "Fonti musicali" and "Il Fronimo."
He is the author of the volumes Franz Schubert (Mursia, 1992; new revised and expanded edition, 2022), I fratelli Sammartini (Rugginenti, 2000) and Paganini. La vita, le opere, il suo tempo (Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2020), also translated into English in 2022 (Paganini. His Life, Works, and Time). In 2024, he co-edited the second part of the Paganini's Letters (1831-1840) (Curci-Accademia di Santa Cecilia), together with Mariateresa Dellaborra, Roberto Iovino, and Nicole Oliveri, while in 2025 he co-authored the volume L’Affaire Paganini (Sedm), which for the first time reconstructs the composer’s complicated post-mortem story.
He has lectured on Paganini at the University of Rhode Island, Stony Brook University on Long Island, and New Bulgarian University in Sofia. In 2023, he was awarded the "Una Vita per Paganini" prize by the Paganini Guitar Festival in Parma, and in 2025, he was awarded the "Chitarra d'Oro" for his musicological studies on the history of the guitar. He is a member of the Centro Studi Paganiniani in Genoa, and in 2025, he was appointed to the Committee for the National Edition of Paganini's Works.
From 1987 to 1994 he was artistic director of the record label Nuova Era, for which he oversaw dozens of world premiere recordings of rare and unknown works by Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, and Mercadante. Since 1996 he has been artistic director of the record label Dynamic and the Istituto Discografico Italiano, labels with which he pursues the same goals. Among the main recordings made for Dynamic are the Opera omnia by Niccolò Paganini (2019) and the complete violin concertos by Giuseppe Tartini and Giovanni Battista Viotti.