BIOGRAPHY

With his multiform career as a composer, conductor and pianist, Francesco Libetta has given concerts all over the world. He has received commissions from European, Japanese and American associations and festivals for orchestral, chamber and electro-acoustic compositions. His repertoire as a conductor includes symphonic works by Wagner, Debussy and Mozart, as well as his own works, and ballet (Fredy Franzutti’s productions of Sleeping Beauty and Nutcraker, with Balletto del Sud).

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).