Born in 1964 in Barletta, Italy, Francesco Lotoro is a pianist, composer, and conductor in addition to being a piano professor at the “U. Giordano” Music Conservatory, in Foggia. He obtained his piano diploma at the “N. Piccinni” Music Conservatory in Bari, then continued his piano studies with Kornel Zempleny and Laszlo Almasy at the “F. Liszt” Music Academy in Budapest, and he fine-tuned his studies with Viktor Merzhanov, Tamas Vasary, and Aldo Ciccolini.
For the past 30 years, he has tirelessly been involved in recovering, studying, revising, archiving, executing, recording, and promoting thousands of works of concentrationary music. He has recovered over 8,000 scores—often produced in a condition of deprivation of the most elementary human rights—in concentration, extermination, and civil and military imprisonment camps all over the world from 1933 (opening of the KZ Dachau) to 1953 (death of Joseph Stalin and amnesty for Gulag prisoners).
He is the author—as pianist, organist, and conductor—of the KZ Musik, a CD encyclopedia in 24 volumes (Musikstrasse—ICML) containing 407 works written in civilian and military captivity during the Second World War, and of the Anthology of Concentrationary Music.
Currently he is working on the edition of the Encyclopaedia Thesaurus Musicae Concentrationariae, a monumental multivolume work dedicated to music written in concentration camps and to all related composers.