Biography

Francesco Attardi studied Piano, Composition and Conducting at the 'G. Verdi ' Conservatory of Milan, earning the Piano Diploma and the Academic Master in Conducting with Honors. He also received the degree in Musicology at the University of Bologna. After his musical studies at the G. Verdi Conservatory in Milan, he specialized in conducting with Murry Sidlin at the Aspen Music School (US) and with Leopold Hager at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and completed his training as an assistant to Romano Gandolfi at Teatro alla Scala and Teatro del Liceo in Barcelona, and Giuseppe Patanè and Wolfgang Sawallisch at the Munich State Opera. Francesco Attardi occupies a prominent place in the Italian music scene, having combined the musicological skills with his remarkable conducting activity. He published critical editions (Suvini Zerboni publisher, Milan) of forgotten masterpieces of Italian nineteenth-century symphonies, such as Giovanni Sgambati’s symphonies (the most important Franz Liszt’s pupil and the father of the Italian symphonic music) that he conducted in first performances in modern times in Milan (Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano, ‘La Verdi’ Orchestra), in Palermo (Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana) and in Catania (Teatro Massimo ‘Vincenzo Bellini’), etc.

Born to an American mother from Boston, Francesco recently obtained the American Green Card and lives between Italy and Arizona (Scottsdale). Active in Italy and abroad, he has performed in tournées in Japan with the Kyushu Symphony Orchestra, in the Czech Republic with the Bohemian Symphony Orchestra, the Choir of Radio Prague and the Chamber Orchestra of Prague, in Germany with the Jaener Philarmonie, in Mexico with the Symphony Orchestra of Jalisco (Guadalajara) and the Guanajuato Symphony, in US with the Denver Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra of New York and the New Jersey College Choir (in the historic Kings Theater of Brooklyn, with an audience of more than three thousand people, concert televised by EWTN). He has also conducted renowned soloists such as Bruno Canino, Huseyn Sermet, Paul Badura-Skoda, Valentina Lisitsa, Martina Filjak, Natasha Korsakova, Desirè Rancatore.

Francesco Attardi is one of the major Ottorino Respighi specialists, and author of the book “Ottorino Respighi, A Symphonic Iceberg”, which will be published next July 2024 (LIM publisher, 1045 pages, which will soon have an English edition). His mission is to raise awareness of Respighi's enormous symphonic repertoire, including the 15 symphonic compositions he wrote for the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.