The Colli&Rubini Duo is the authorised founder and enthusiastic driving force behind what is now named the Marinuzzi Project. Created around the multifaceted career of Gino Marinuzzi Jr., it aims to make better known the fascinating, vibrant and varied life of an Italian composer born in New York in 1920 and dying in Rome in 1996. The CD Gino Marinuzzi Jr. Piano Works, published in 2012 by the Italian label Tactus (Bologna), is intended to be a companion to a second CD, due to be released in combination with a book which will include the respective scores of the recorded music. This is also the main objective of three-year PhD research which Rossella is currently undertaking at the University of Surrey (London).

This adventure started in 2008, when Rossella came across the manuscript of the Lagerlieder, a piece for four hands piano composed by Marinuzzi during his detention in a Nazi camp in Germany between 1943 and 1945. The initial curiosity turned soon into a wider investigation of the man, his life, his history and his professional development. Her interest continued and grew especially when meeting his surviving family: thanks to Anna Maria and Giovanna Marinuzzi and to his wife Liana Santarone, a well-populated landscape of Marinuzzi-related people and Institutions all over Italy and occasionally abroad has emerged. As a result, there was revealed a brilliant pianist, a talented pupil, a composer who never ceased his personal development through the language of music, a man who preserved his enthusiasm also for teaching. Marinuzzi studied in Milan, lived and worked mainly in Rome, composed classic music during his early professional career and then turned his attention to screen music. In 1956, he co-founded the first laboratory for electroacoustic music in Italy (Rome), later devising, along with the engineer Giuliano Strini (University of Milan) and the sound engineer Paolo Ketoff, the first electroacoustic instrument in Italy, the Fonosynth, in 1966. Marinuzzi had been teaching composition for many years at the Conservatories of Rome and Frosinone (Italy).

Since all the source material about Marinuzzi is extremely fragmented and unorganised, the Marinuzzi Project is a planned programme of actions and scholarship, uniquely a collaboration between the Marinuzzi family, the Colli&Rubini Duo and Dr. Maurizio Corbella (University of Milan), who is dedicating his research particularly to Marinuzzi’s screen music and electronic pioneering.

In the meantime, the Colli&Rubini Duo is performing Gino Marinuzzi Jr.’s piano music in Europe and abroad, as a means to promote his music and to reveal his personality.