The Pan Piper

He was a prodigious talent and started playing the panpipes from the age of seven,when he was gifted a panpipe set by Romanian musician Gheorghe Zamfir. He picked it up fast and by the age of 16,he had performed his first music concert in Geneva. “When I went to the Geneva Music Academy to learn the panpipes,they did not have teachers who could teach the instrument,so they offered to teach me the single flute. Though I had a teacher for eight years,I am practically self-taught on this instrument,” says the 45-year-old,who runs a music school in Geneva where he teaches panpipes to children. Apart from his own compositions,Tirabosco has played compositions by Vivaldi,Mozart and Bach.

Born in Rome and brought up in Geneva,Tirabosco’s father was an Italian classical opera singer. So he trained to become a singer,like his father,performing with the L’Ensemble Vocal Lausanne choir. “But I could not continue doing both. My first singing lesson was at the age of 18,so it was too late to become a singer and I was also a professional panpipe player by then,” he says. At 20,he had recorded his first CD with Swiss musician Andre Luy,an organist at the Lausanne cathedral. He was invited to perform at the Chateau of Bourglinster (Luxemburg) in the presence of the Grand Duke.

Tirabosco is also credited with modifying the panpipe for classical music by adding a lower note of the “C major” scale. Since Western classical music was never scored for panpipes,Tirabosco had to modify the instrument to resemble the sound of a flute. Even the width and length of the tubes were altered. “I mostly play the repertory of a single flute in concerts,so in order to have the same scale as that of a flute,I modified the panpipe. This is better when playing Western classical compositions,” he says,having written six concertos so far.