Since 1988, Lotoro has been on a journey to find the forgotten music of concentration camps. “It is the very notion of resistance, not allowing yourself to be completely beaten by people who want your physical and intellectual death… Music kept them alive. It was to preserve and assert their humanity,” Lotoro says in The Maestro: In Search of the Last Music (2017), a documentary film on his quest made by Franco-Argentine filmmaker Alexandre Valenti.

Lotoro lives in Barletta, a little town hugging the Adriatic Sea in Italy. Thirty years ago, he gave up a career as an active concert pianist to find, archive and record music composed by inmates in the “death camps”. “It is my duty as a musicologist, researcher and musician to restore this concentration literature,” says Lotoro.