Cinico Angelini

Biography
Cinico Angelini (pseudonym of Angelo Cinico) was born in a village in the north-eastern Italian region of Piedmont. Being an autodidact at the violin, he did not go to conservatory. At 19 years of age, he moved to Turin and played as a violinist in small entertainment ensembles in coffee houses. In 1925, he formed his first orchestra, the Perroquet Royal Band, with which he worked in Caracas, Venezuela, for four years. Upon his return in Italy, he formed a new dance band with which he performed in the Sala Gay, a well-known entertainment bar in Turin. In the course of the 1930s, Angelini and his orchestra became frequent guests in radio programmes of Italian nationwide radio (EIAR), in which they performed light opera repertoire as well as romantic and popular songs. In 1938, Angelini was contracted by EIAR and formed a radio orchestra. His trademark was the traditional ‘orchestra d’archi’, a string-dominated ensemble in which brass and especially percussion did not feature prominently.

After the war, he and his orchestra continued to work for Italian radio, working with artists such as Nilla Pizzi, Michele Montanari, and Trio Lescano. In 1951, Angelini’s orchestra accompanied all entries in the very first Sanremo Song Festival, won by Nilla Pizzi. Angelini worked as a musical director in the Sanremo Festival on seven more occasions between 1952 and 1962. In the early 1960s, with a new generation of singers heavily influenced by rock ‘n’ roll making their mark, Angelini’s string orchestra began to sound quite outdated, which resulted in him not being asked again for the Sanremo Festival.

Cinico Angelini joined the winner of the Sanremo Festival to the Eurovision Song Contest twice. In 1960, in the Royal Festival Hall in London, he conducted the orchestra for Renato Rascel who sang ‘Romantica’. Two years later, he travelled to Luxembourg with Claudio Villa, who sang a song by Domenico Modugno called ‘Addio, addio’. Neither of these entries did particularly well in the contest, finishing in the bottom-half of the table.

In due course, a more extensive biography of Cinico Angelini will be published on this website