Simone Rubino - About

To me BBT is synonymous with Passion, Understanding, Courage, Support, Gratitude and Family. Ever since I got the fantastic news of becoming one of the BBT Fellowship winners in 2020, a wonderful relationship has opened up with the BBT team, and everyone is always ready to contribute with passion and love to help the artist and make dreams become true. As an artist I feel it is my responsibility to express and communicate, through art, moral values in which I strongly believe. Without art and culture, man would lose his identity and his function in the world. And it is for this reason that I admire and am extremely grateful to BBT for supporting young artists and making this become an important mission.

BBT’s second only solo percussionist, Italian Simone Rubino is a composer and a singer too. In the midst of the first Covid lockdowns, Simone asked fellow-composer Lamberto Curtoni to write something for him as both player and singer. Lamberto turned to a poem by Mariangela Gualtieri, Quel metro che ci avvicina (That meter that brings us closer), as a reflection and reaction to the time of the pandemic. And in turn this commission led to a wider film project, Il Ritmo della Terra (The Rhythm of the Earth), for which Simone commissioned Curtoni’s score: a chamber opera for small orchestra, percussion and voice, filmed in Bavaria and realised by Live Music Now Berlin. BBT then helped Simone release the film commercially on the First Hand Records label; and the film was also screened during BBT’s 20th anniversary celebrations in London, where Simone appeared as soloist in Kate Whitley’s Verified with the Multi-Story Orchestra and at Wigmore Hall performing Bach on the marimba.

With a new vision for the future – composing, curating and collaborating in performance – Simone is using his remaining BBT Fellowship funding to upgrade his online presence, including his own website and social media channels.

Simone has been supported with a BBT Fellowship since 2020.

For a current biography please visit simonerubino.com

Read a blog by Simone Rubino, Lockdown Commission for Singing Percussionist, here:

Press Release: Il Ritmo della Terra

Photographs by Marco Borggreve and Simon Weir