John Ardoin declared that of the new generation of pianists, Francesco Libetta is “the most inspired and creative”. Harold Schonberg wrote that: “master of every period and style, Libetta is the best representative of this modern style (…) who accepts virtuosity not as tightrope walking but as a species of literalism, where musical meaning is more important than knock’-em dead fingerwork (American Record Guide). Paolo Isotta wrote in the Corriere della Sera newspaper of “such a miraculous virtuosity and such a delicate sense of the language of melody as to prompt the question: what other artist of his generation, not only in Italy, can be compared to him?”

He performed and recorded the cycle of all 32 Beethoven’s Sonatas (1993/4), and the first performance of what for decades had been regarded as an unperformable “corpus monstre”: the 53 Studies by Godowsky based on the 27 Studies by Chopin (1990, repeated in 1994/95 and 2006).