David Alagna

Born in France of Sicilian parents, David Alagna has been influenced from his early age by French popular music and Sicilian traditional music, then by opera. He has an instinctive passion for the popular musical instruments, for the mixture of styles and the association of rustic and classical colours. By descent, he first studied guitar, thanks to the traditional family learning that gave him a solid cultural heritage after many years of study. He carried on his musical studies and kept on learning the guitar as an autodidact; this instrument in particular led him to jazz music, of which he is a performer, arranger and composer. In parallel he perfected his approach of jazz or modern harmony, developed his taste for improvisation as well as the study of classical orchestration.

David Alagna mostly devotes his time to write for the voice, with in particular Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Man), Poésies non choisies (Unchosen Poems) – a set of songs for piano and voice by David and Frédérico Alagna on classical authors’ poems – or a musical and theatrical adaptation of Gluck’s opera Orphée et Eurydice.

In varied music styles (classical, jazz, traditional or modern pop), David Alagna is also an arranger and a performer, as in Sérénades ??(Deutsche Grammophon), a collection album for voices and two guitars of opera arias transcriptions and French, Italian and Neapolitan songs. He is also a stage director and designer. He directed ??I Pagliacci by Leoncavallo at the Santander Festival (with revivals at the Bilbao Opera and the Teatro Filarmonico in Verona), The Barber of Seville by Rossini at the Giessen Opera for which he also designed the costumes. In 2003 he directed the world-premiere of the French original and complete version of Cyrano de Bergerac by Franco Alfano for the Radio-France – Montpellier Festival (DVD Deutsche Grammophon). David Alagna also directed Werther by Massenet at the Teatro Regio in Torino and adapted Orphée et Eurydice by Gluck for the Teatro Comunale in Bologne then for the Corum in Montpellier.