Fiercely committed to the music of today, violinist and composer Giancarlo Latta is interested in the intersection and convergence of music old and new.

Through a broad repertoire and bold dedication to wide-ranging collaborative possibilities, he curates projects and programs that explore varied compositional voices and draw threads across styles and centuries. 

He has worked with dozens of composers both young and established, including Marcos Balter, Christopher Cerrone, Mario Davidovsky, Pierre Jalbert, George Lewis, Aaron Jay Kernis, Steven Stucky, Christopher Theofanidis, and Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and has been heard in venues as diverse as New York’s Lincoln Center, the Rothko Chapel and Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston, Mariinsky II in St. Petersburg, National Sawdust in Brooklyn, London’s Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms, and Lucerne’s Neubad, a multipurpose performance space in a former public swimming pool. He has performed with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), JACK Quartet, and members of New York’s Talea Ensemble.

In 2019, Giancarlo joined the acclaimed Argus Quartet, hailed by the New Yorker as a “vivacious foursome” that “plays canonical standards with authority and verve and approaches modern music with care and assurance.” New Music Box called the Quartet’s performance at the 2020 Chamber Music America conference “clear proof that new and old music can co-exist in a performance and that both can benefit from the linkage.” The 2019-20 season included performances the Brand Library, Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music, Schneider Concerts at the New School, Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series, and scheduled engagements with Washington Performing Arts at the Kennedy Center and the Dame Myra Hess Memorial Concerts in Chicago, cancelled due to COVID-19.

Other recent highlights include duo performances with flutist Claire Chase as part of Houston’s Da Camera series (in the world premiere of a DACAMERA commission by composer Erik Ulman), Georg Friedrich Haas’ in vain in Houston and Charleston, and the U.S. premiere of Liza Lim’s opera Tree of Codes at the Spoleto Festival USA. Giancarlo has held residencies at Avaloch Farm, Yellow Barn (with Argus), and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. In spring 2016, Giancarlo curated and premiered “16x16: The Rice Encores Project,” a large-scale commissioning endeavor featuring sixteen new short works for violin and piano and showcasing the entire Rice University composition studio; a recording of all sixteen pieces was released in early 2018. From 2017-19 he was a fellow in the DACAMERA Young Artist Program, performing and teaching in communities across Houston. He has also taught at Sitka Fine Arts Camp (Alaska), where he directed the String Chamber Music Intensive.

With pianist-composer Robert Fleitz, Giancarlo is a member of the duo escapeVelocity, which focuses on violin and piano music of the 20th and 21st centuries, including commissioned works, and is the recipient of a Chamber Music America Ensemble Forward Grant. He is also a founding member of KINETIC, a Houston-based conductorless ensemble, with whom he has performed as soloist, leader, and principal second violin, in addition to serving as part of the group’s core administrative team. As an orchestral musician, he was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America in 2013, and has attended the Lucerne Festival Academy and the Aspen Music Festival. Other festival credits include the Lake George Music Festival, the Banff Centre’s Ensemble Evolution, the New York String Orchestra Seminar, the Contemporary Performance Institute at Wellesley College/Brandeis University, and the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme. 

As a composer, Giancarlo strives to blur boundaries between pitch and sound, between notation and improvisation, and between composer and performer. He has received commissions from the Pioneer High School Orchestras and KINETIC, and his works have been performed at the Aspen Music Festival, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and on Houston Public Media. As a writer, his essays and reviews have appeared in Strings and Listen magazines and online at Classical Post.

Originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Giancarlo studied with Paul Kantor at Rice University and Almita Vamos at the Music Institute of Chicago.

Shorter bios available here.