Mauro Colombis

Mauro Colombis is an Italian classically trained musician with international concert experience. He has two masters in piano performance ( from Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory in 1998 and Venice Conservatory in 2005) and a Bachelor of Art, Music and Spectacle from the University of Bologna
.
Since 1993 he has been involved in music for silent movies. His first piano accompaniment was for “Back to God's Country”, (Nell Shipman) and “Il fuoco” (Giovanni Pastrone) in Pordenone, Italy. Having developed his own improvisatory and compositional style for silent movies during the 1990s style, Mauro has played every year at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival since 2002.

After returning to Italy from Moscow, where he lived from 1995 till early 2001, he developed his own improvisatory style and started to compose and improvise for silent movies. He played for the Bologna “Malombra” Association (Festival dedicated to Italian silent movies, Buster Keaton and Louise Brooks), for “Cinemazero” in Pordenone (Retrospective of Carl Theodor Dreyer).

Since 2002 he has played every year in “The Pordenone Silent Film Festival”. In 2002 he accompained “Thais” (Anton Giulio Bragaglia). In 2003 he attended the School of Music and Images run by the renowned silent movies pianist Neil Brand. In 2004 he was commissioned to compose a special accompaniment with piano, violin and voice for the Hungarian film “Vorrei morir” ( Károly Lajthay), incorporating music by Paolo Tosti. In 2005 he was asked to play the piano score by Jurgen Simpson for Andrew Legge's new short “The unusual invention of Henry Cavendish” . In 2006 he has composed a piano accompaniment for “The story of the Kelly Gang”

He has lived in Sydney since 2005.