The Playtoy Orchestra (PTO) was founded in 2002 and is the first music band in the world playing real toy-instruments (both toys designed to be played and toys that simply produce a sound).
This confers the band a playful and humorous image as well as an utterly original set of sounds.
The vast variety of plastic and hard-paper drums, together with the extravagant sounds of toy-pianos, accordions and xylophones have led the band towards a glowing, instrumental, original music genre, whose creative arrangements and enjoyable melodies are of irresistible appeal both to children and grown-ups, music experts and amateurs: the Lounge Music.
Movie soundtracks, successful advertising jingles, exotic atmospheres recalled by Mambo and Bossa Nova rhythms represent the bare bones of the brilliant music collection performed by the Playtoy Orchestra (PTO), all sprinkled with wit, sudden rhythm/style shifts and melodic squiggles, which have an immediate grip on a public of all ages!
The band, which is made up of six to eight professional musicians, adds to the positive “groove” of its Lounge collection state-of-the-art musical experiments that take their move from classic well-known masterpieces. This allows the PTO to glide from easy jazz to Rossini’s Tarantella, from Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable movie soundtracks to Mozart, from Quincy Jones’ Soul-Bossa-Nova to Vittorio Monti’s Czardas. Creative remakes of Beethoven, Brahams and Johan Strauss are worth mentioning, too.
All songs are played with toys, whose sounds lead us back to childhood, a season of our life in which our creative energy runs unleashed on the spur of pure fantasy and freedom of expression.
The PTO has performed all over the world: from Italy to Tunisia, from Colombia to South Korea, from Luxemburg to Albania, from France to Poland, from Portugal to Bulgaria…China…Germany.
The band also shared the stage with the “Piccolo Coro dell’Antoniano di Bologna”, the internationally famous Italian white-voice choir, undisputed protagonist of the most important children music festival of Italy, the “Zecchino d’Oro”.
The PTO performed in various TV and radio shows too and was interviewed by lots of national and foreign media.