Biography (read more)
Beniamino Paganini (b. 1994) is a Belgian-Italian traverso player, harpsichordist, organist and musicologist based in Flanders. He discovered early music at the age of seven, began bachelor studies at both Royal Conservatories of Brussels at sixteen, and went on to study in Leuven and The Hague, taking master’s degrees in traverso (2016), harpsichord (2017) and maestro al cembalo (2019) as well as a bachelor’s degree in musicology (2018). His teachers included Barthold Kuijken, Frank Theuns and Jan De Winne for traverso, Frédérick Haas, Fabio Bonizzoni and Kris Verhelst for harpsichord, and Patrick Ayrton for maestro al cembalo. In 2006, aged twelve, he founded the ensemble Musica Gloria in Bruges, which he has directed jointly with the oboist Nele Vertommen since 2020.
Under Paganini’s direction Musica Gloria has grown from a children’s Christmas-concert group into a professional historically informed baroque ensemble that plays some thirty concerts a year at venues and festivals including AMUZ, Bozar, Concertgebouw Brugge, Bachfest Leipzig, the Kölner Philharmonie, Festival Oude Muziek Utrecht and Trigonale. He directs from the harpsichord, organ and claviorganum and also appears as traverso soloist, and the ensemble has issued seven CDs, among them The Bachs & The Flute (2022), Corelli & Handel: Encounters in Rome (2023) and Händel’s Chandos Anthems (2025). Musica Gloria’s YouTube channel, with more than fifty studio-quality recordings, has become one of the ensemble’s main outlets and a repertoire resource for rarely heard works such as Juan Bautista Comes’s Romance a San Miguel. Paganini was named Young Musician of the Year 2020 by the Belgian music press, was chosen by Radio Klara in 2021 as one of “twenty musicians in their twenties”, and received the Sonderpreis der Jury at the International Telemann Competition in 2021. He also collaborates with Scherzi Musicali, Il Gardellino, Les Muffatti and B’Rock, and teaches temperaments and tunings at the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles.
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