Antonio Del Castillo is this year’s winner of the national competition “Jugend musiziert” in the accordion category and will receive the special prize of Draiflessen GmbH & Co. oHG for this at the meetMUSIC Open Air. Antonio was born in Munich in 2004, grew up trilingually in a musically active Italian-English family and currently attends the musical Pestalozzi-Gymnasium in Munich.
At the age of five, Antonio repeatedly expressed his desire to learn to play the accordion, and even before his sixth birthday he received his first lessons. He first learned piano accordion and then button accordion. Since 2017, he has been receiving accordion lessons from Marko Ševarlić, with whom he learned to play the melody bass, among other things. He has refined his playing in various master classes.
As an accordion soloist, Antonio has won prizes in several competitions in recent years. However, he is also active as an orchestral musician and plays chamber music, most recently in a quintet at a benefit concert in Munich in July 2022. Since 2021 he has been a scholarship holder of the association “YEHUDI MENUHIN Live Music Now München e.V.” and has performed several concerts in Munich and the surrounding area within this framework.
His repertoire includes baroque and classical music, contemporary original literature for accordion as well as light music of various kinds (operetta, tango, jazz). Besides playing the accordion, Antonio loves to improvise on the piano and is interested in composition.
