Francesco Piemontesi maintains a broad keyboard repertoire while concentrating especially on Mozart and the composers of the early Romantic era. He has partnered with leading orchestras throughout Europe and the United States and has appeared at principal concert halls on both continents, among them a complete traversal of Mozart’s keyboard output presented at London’s Wigmore Hall.
Born on 7 July 1983 in Locarno, within Switzerland’s Italian-speaking Ticino canton, Piemontesi spent his early years in the neighboring community of Tenero. After an early demonstration of ability that led to his first public appearance in 1994, he entered the Lugano University of Music at the age of fifteen. Following his secondary-school graduation in 2002, he continued his training at the Hannover University of Music and Drama—now the University of Music, Drama, and Media—in Germany, where his principal teacher was Arie Vardi; he subsequently worked with Alfred Brendel, Alexis Weissenberg, and Murray Perahia.
Three decisive achievements opened doors for his international career: victory at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2007, receipt of the Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in 2009, and designation as a BBC New Generation Artist for the 2009–2011 seasons. His first commercial recording appeared in 2010 on the Claves label as the fourth installment in a multi-pianist survey of Schumann’s complete piano music.
Piemontesi has since become a regular presence on orchestral series in Europe and the United States, performing concertos with the London Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and the Cleveland Orchestra. Recital engagements have taken him to the Musikverein and Konzerthaus in Vienna, Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall in New York, Wigmore Hall in London, and numerous additional venues. At Wigmore Hall he launched a full cycle of Mozart’s piano music in 2016 and inaugurated a comparable Schubert cycle in 2019. Although he is frequently heard in Mozart, Beethoven, and the early Romantics, he also champions Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, and other late-Romantic and early-twentieth-century composers.
Chamber-music collaborations have included violinist Renaud Capuçon, clarinetist Jörg Widmann, and the Emerson String Quartet. Festival appearances encompass the BBC Proms, the Aix-en-Provence Festival, and the Mostly Mozart Festival. Since 2013 he has served as artistic director of the Settimane Musicali di Ascona in Switzerland. His discography of the 2010s and 2020s includes releases on Naïve, Orfeo, and Linn; in 2019 he recorded Schubert’s late piano sonatas for PentaTone, and the following year he joined cellist Daniel Müller-Schott for an album of Brahms’s cello sonatas. Also in 2020 he issued Bach Nostalghia, followed in 2021 by Schoenberg, Messiaen, Ravel and, in 2023, an album containing Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes and Piano Sonata in B minor.
