Giusi Petringa · Il Giornale, 1996
His name is Jacopo Baboni, and at twenty-four he has already presented compositions in Italy and abroad.
For a year Jacopo has lived in Paris in a studio so small it resembles a doll’s house, where he had to choose between piano and bed. He has travelled Italy and abroad—Brussels, Lisbon and Mexico City—to present his music, but returns, even briefly, to the family home in Cernusco sul Naviglio, above the old pharmacy where his parents Maria Grazia and Carlo work. Soon his brother Nicola, nearing graduation, will join them.
A textbook path: a middle-class family, Gonzaga science high school, three diplomas—composition and contemporary music in Milan and composition in Bologna—and enough prizes and scholarships to fill a CV page. He is Jacopo Baboni but recently added his grandfather’s surname Schilingi, because his grandfather, a lawyer by profession and musician by vocation…
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…came the invitation to IRCAM, the French research institute where the music for Farinelli was created, studying interactions between traditional instruments and computers.
The rest is today’s story: a girlfriend, Marcella, studying political science; nightclub evenings—“I scandalise my fellow composers”; dinners at home—“strictly standing, otherwise we do not fit”; cooking—“my French friends go mad for my pasta”; parties and many friends, often older. The most important are architect Pier Luigi Copat and writer Gilles Thouyard. With them he is creating…
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Pull quote: he inherited his passion for piano from his grandfather. Teacher Ivan Fedele, with whom he studied for nine years, then recognised that vocation.