Paolo Bottini

Paolo Bottini was born in Cremona, motherland of famous composers such as Claudio Monteverdi, Tarquinio Merula and Amilcare Ponchielli. He graduated in organ, piano and harpsichord. Bottini’s most genuine vocation as an organist is to pay his service during catholic liturgical celebrations. Since 1986, he has been the official organist of the Lingiardi organ (1865) in Croce Santo Spirito (Castelvetro Piacentino). In 2012 and 2013, during a two-year stay in Paris, he obtained the qualification as a liturgic organist of the Paris diocese. He was also the substitute organist (choir organ) at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité in Paris, where Olivier Messiaen was official organist. Since 2015, he has accompanied the Saturday evening liturgy celebrated in the Basilica of Santa Maria di Campagna in Piacenza; here he plays the prestigious organ – a Serassi’s (1825) – which Padre Davide da Bergamo, the greatest organist of the Italian Risorgimento, conceived and regularly played. Since 1997, Bottini has been an organ soloist as well. His career boasts prestigious invitations, such as that to the Magadino International Organ Music Festival, in Switzerland (2016), and to the Organistic Auditions in Notre-Dame in Paris (2017). Among the great number of albums recorded as an organ soloist, there are those devoted to Giuseppe Verdi, Amilcare Ponchielli, Giacomo Puccini, Vincenzo Petrali, Claude Debussy, Ferruccio Busoni, Gaetano Valeri and Giovanni Battista Pescetti. He was the secretary of the Associazione Italiana Organisti di Chiesa from 1998 to 2011. He is the author of the first monograph devoted to Federico Caudana (1878–1963), renown organist and maestro di cappella in Cremona Cathedral (the study was published in 2009 on the Bollettino Storico Cremonese). He was also the curator of the catalogue of Caudana’s collected musical manuscripts kept in the Public Library of Cremona.