Overview
Federico Ercoli is part of the new generation of artists who seek to combine musicological research and musical performance in their careers. Laureate of the MA Fortepiano Competition 2024 of the MA Festival Brugge, Federico is at ease on historical and modern keyboards. He studied harpsichord with Lisa Crawford and Edoardo Bellotti, fortepiano with Mike Cheng-Yu Lee and Malcolm Bilson, and piano with Alexander Kobrin, and is further specializing in historically informed performance practice under Paul O’Dette.
He graduated with honors from the Conservatorio “Giuseppe Verdi” in Milan, studying with Annibale Rebaudengo and Silvia Limongelli. He then continued his studies at the Fondazione Santa Cecilia in Portogruaro with Alessandro Taverna and at the Accademia Pianistica Internazionale “Incontri col Maestro” in Imola with Piero Rattalino. Under the latter’s artistic guidance, Federico developed an original approach to the repertoire, expanding his musical research to include historical-critical and aesthetic reflection. In 2020, he obtained a master’s degree in Musicology with top marks and honors from the University of Pavia, Cremona Department, with a thesis on new perspectives on staging Wagner. As a result of this research, he has been awarded the prestigious Richard-Wagner-Stipendienstiftung scholarship at the Bayreuth Festival.
Already a winner of several national competitions, in June 2016, he won the First Prize at the Concorso Pianistico Internazionale “Andrea Baldi” in Bologna and, in 2018, he is among the winners of the Ibla Grand Prize, thanks to which he has the opportunity to perform at the Recital Hall of the V.Sarajishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire, at the KIOI Hall in Tokyo and the Weill Recital Hall of Carnegie Hall in New York. In 2017, he participated in the Gran Galà Armonie della Sera, performing with the Solisti Aquilani the Concerto in D Major by J. S. Bach in the Teatro dell’Aquila in Fermo. In the same year, he was chosen as the sole representative of the Milan Conservatory at the International Music Festival in Kyoto, Japan. In 2018, he played the closing recital for the ASAM season at the Teatro Comunale di Siracusa, performing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony transcribed by Franz Liszt. In 2021, he participated in the first performance in modern times of Giovanni Bottesini’s oratorio The Garden of Olivet, playing the symphonic transcription for piano. In 2022, he performed at Kodak Hall in Rochester, NY, with the Eastman Wind Ensemble in the premiere performance of Brad Lubman’s ESM 100.
In 2023, he was awarded the Jerald C. Graue Fellowship by the Eastman School of Music faculty, a prestigious recognition of excellence in musicological research. In 2024, the Faculty of the Musicology Department again awarded the Jerald C. Graue Fellowship to Federico, making him the only student ever to receive this recognition twice in a row. In addition to the study of Wagnerian theater, his research interests in recent years have focused on the organological study of historical keyboards, the interplay between musical semiotics and Schenkerian analysis in the works of the late Robert Schumann, and the comparative analysis of 19th-century instructive music editions and early recordings. In this area, Federico took part in the 19th Century Piano-Playing Styles Conference at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire in February 2024 with a paper entitled “In defense of the inauthentic text. The use of non-original editions for aesthetic-performance research on the opening of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2.”
In 2024, he earned the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts with a Major in Performance & Literature, with a Certificate of Advanced Achievement in Early Music from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. A devoted teacher with an eye for innovative approaches to piano teaching, he served as a piano instructor at the Eastman Community Music School and taught Class Piano at the Eastman School. In the same prestigious institution, Federico served as a Teaching Assistant in the studio of Alexander Kobrin.
A proud member of the Pi Kappa Lambda honor society, Federico believes in the constant and integrated interaction of the highest level of musical performance and academic study, philological research, and musical aesthetic awareness, in constant original and individual artistic expression.