Singer and conductor, he has dedicated much of his musical career to the study and dissemination of the vocal polyphonic repertoire of the Renaissance, a field where he is considered among the most acute and significant performers. He has recorded for important labels including Sony Music, Archiv-Deutsche Grammophon, Alpha, Arcana, Pan Classics, Harmonia Mundi, EMI, and Stradivarius. In 2001, he founded De Labyrintho, which under his direction has established itself as one of the most sensitive and engaging vocal ensembles specialising in the repertoire of the XVth and XVIth centuries, performing at Europe’s most important festivals, and winning prizes such as the Gramophone Critic’s Choice, and the Amadeus Award for the best album of the year. Since 2011, he has directed RossoPorpora, a young vocal and instrumental ensemble pursuing an ambitious program of study of the Italian madrigal repertoire, and performing in prestigious festivals including Laus Polyphoniæ in Antwerp and Oude Muziek in Utrecht. RossoPorpora’s latest album, dedicated to the madrigals of Italian composer Luca Marenzio, has been acclaimed by the international press, winning among other awards the prestigious Preis der deutschen Schnallplattennkritik, the German-speaking music critics’ prize. As a singer, Testolin has worked with many of the principal directors of Renaissance and Baroque music in Europe. He has sung in concerts and on recordings with the Belgian orchestra La Petite Bande, directed by Sigiswald Kuijken, and for over twenty five years with the Choir of the Italian Swiss Radio. At the 2015 Salzburg Festival, he sang in Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride, directed by Diego Fasolis and staged by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, with Cecilia Bartoli in the leading role. He has also been active on the contemporary music scene, singing and directing works by some of the most important living composers, and recently taking part in the staging of the operas Cuore di Cane by A. Raskatov, and Die Soldaten by B.A . Zimmermann at La Scala in Milan. He holds courses, lectures, and master classes for prestigious institutions in Italy and abroad. He is the author of a study, presented during the symposium Josquin & the Sublime organized by the University of Utrecht, and published by the Rivista Italiana di Musicologia, arguing that the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Portrait of a Musician” at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana of Milan is the great Renaissance composer Josquin Desprez. Other articles have been published by Olschki, De Agostini, and Paragon in Italy, and Brepols in Belgium. Dedicated to the diffusion of music, he played a leading role with his ensemble De Labyrintho in the Rai 5 program Come un’alma rapita, on the life of Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (part of the Raccontare la storia series by Sandro Cappelletto), and reconstructed and recorded the music contained in Caravaggio’s paintings for the documentary Dentro Caravaggio by Tomaso Montanari, directed by Luca Criscenti, also for Rai 5. He is the author of the entry on madrigals in the book Musica, part of the editorial project The Italian Contribution to the History of Thought of the Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani, published in 2018.Since June 2019, he is the founder-director of the Bach Collegium Rome, and the co- founder and artistic director of Ghimel, a cultural association active in the study and dissemination of musical culture and practice, bringing together various artistic and cultural worlds in Italy today. Moreover, since 2021 he teaches Renaissance and Baroque singing at the G. Tartini Conservatory in Trieste.

English translation by Antonia Harper