Alberto Sanna, violinist and musicologist, was born in Cagliari, Sardinia. He was trained at the Milan Conservatory, the Longy School of Music in Boston, and the University of Oxford. He studied modern violin with Felice Cusano and Zinaida Gilels, historical violin with Phoebe Carrai and Manfredo Kraemer, and completed a doctorate in historical musicology at Oxford University under the supervision of Professor Laurence Dreyfus.

As a violinist, Alberto performs on period instruments solo and chamber music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From 1995 to 2005 he freelanced throughout Europe with numerous orchestras. From 1997 to 2001 he directed the ensemble ‘Prometeus’, recording the CD A la vida bona and the CD-Rom Le sette città regie del regno di Sardegna. In 2005 he embarked upon a new project focused on live programmes and recordings of neglected repertoires from seventeenth-century Italy. The CD Fidibus Canere, released in 2007, launched the project with a rich collection of violin sonatas, while introducing the main aesthetic ideas underlying the whole enterprise.

Alberto’s scholarly work also focuses on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, and is based on a blending of critical-theoretical with historical-contextual approaches. Further research interests are historical performance practice and music analysis. A book on Arcangelo Corelli’s poetics of the sonata is currently in preparation. Future projects include an investigation into Alessandro Scarlatti’s compositional strategies in the setting of literary texts to music and a series of critical editions of seventeenth-century solo violin music.

Alberto makes his home in Liverpool, where he enjoys a career as a performer as well as a scholar. Formerly a Lecturer in Music at Magdalen College, Jesus College and Lincoln College, University of Oxford, he is currently Lecturer in Music at Liverpool Hope University.