Biography

Elena is an independent Italian musician. Her most recent recording project, "The Enchanted Forest", was released in September 2025 with the magazine Classic Voice. Throughout 2026 and 2027, Elena will be working on the remastering and further development of the same project, in which the incidental music of Francesco Geminiani enters into dialogue with the voice of the Italian actress Maddalena Crippa. She is also currently working, until 2028, on the collection "Medici Chansonnier / Il Canzoniere Medici ('The Medici Songbook')" (1492–1494), producing an original reinterpretation and a historically informed edition of the legendary anthology of Lorenzo the Magnificent's favourite songs. Elena is a curious and restless artist, little attracted to specialisation, academic formalism or social pretension. She holds diplomas in Piano, Organ, Organ Composition, Choral Conducting and Orchestral Conducting, and sang for fifteen years with the Gregorian Choir directed by Professor Nino Albarosa, touring extensively throughout the world. She graduated in Education from the University of Bologna. As a solo vocalist, she performed the role of Aphrodite in the multimedia opera "Requiem" by the composer Luigi Ceccarelli for the theatre company Fanny & Alexander, which received awards for Best Incidental Music at the BITEF Festival in Belgrade and the MESS Festival in Sarajevo in 2002. For Moni Ovadia's project "Gerusalemme porta dei popoli" ("Jerusalem, Gateway of Peoples"), she recorded sequences by Hildegard of Bingen for the December 2005 issue of Amadeus magazine. In 2001, while conducting a Mass by Costanzo Porta in Ravenna Cathedral, she was approached by Pierre Boulez, who encouraged her to pursue conducting as a profession. A highly acclaimed concert organist and conductor, Elena was guided for thirty years by Daniel Chorzempa, from 1993 until the Maestro's death in 2023. She has performed at prestigious venues including the Grand Hall of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia, Warsaw Cathedral, the Cavaillé-Coll organ of Saint François de Sales in Lyon, the Concert Hall of Columbia University in New York, Niguliste Church in Tallinn, and many other venues across Europe and around the world. For 22 years, Elena personally financed and supported the historic "International Festival of Organ Music" at the Basilica of San Vitale. With sixty-four editions to its name, it was the oldest cultural event in the city of Ravenna. In 2024, it was discontinued by the Ravenna diocesan authorities in order to accommodate the demands of overtourism and the mass-tourism exploitation of the distinguished Early Christian basilica. Passionate about artistic collaboration and new discoveries, Elena devotes herself exclusively to research-based and lesser-known repertoires. She has carried out her entire musical career without the support of public grants, political or Masonic affiliations, or private funding, while consistently seeking to highlight the resistance encountered within the musical world – by both men and women – to leadership roles held by independent women.