was born on March 6, 1973 in Milan (Italy).
He graduated in Genoa with Luciano Lanfranchi and then in Paris with Aldo Ciccolini. He studied composition in his hometown under Danilo Lorenzini, Adelchi Amisano and Bruno Bettinelli. After gaining a university degree in classical philology, Massa earned his doctorate at the Freie Universität Berlin in Musicology with the dissertation "Carl Orff's antique dramas and Hölderlin reception in postwar Germany" (Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2006).
The artist lives in Berlin since 1999. The German capital is the centre of life for him and at the same time the center of his international career as a soloist.
Meanwhile, he has been giving concerts worldwide: in many European countries and in the United States, Uruguay, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Japan, Turkey and the Ukraine.
As a chamber musician, he has collaborated with members of the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Rachmaninoff String Quartet (Russia), the Lamy String Quartet (Japan) and the Quartetto di Venezia (Italy).
His special interest lies in the Italian piano repertoire of the 19th and 20th century. After painstaking and intensive archival research, he discovered the long-lost score of 2nd Piano Concerto in F major Op. 92 by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco in Philadelphia.
The first European performance of the work with Massa took place in September 2009 with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra in the Great Hall of the Berliner Philharmonie. The live recording was then published by the label Capriccio Vienna.
With the release of his live recording of the Piano Concerto No. 3 Rachmaninoff (Genuin Classics, 2007) began a long and fruitful collaboration with conductor Stefan Malzew.
With the Neubrandenburg Philharmonic and the Ernst Senff Choir Berlin, Malzew and Massa then recorded the Concerto for Piano, Orchestra and Male Choir by Ferruccio Busoni (Critics' prize of the "Hessischer Rundfunk 2009").
Their collaboration continued with the recording of Giuseppe Martucci's Piano Concerto No. 2 (Crystal Classics, 2011) and a double CD set featuring both piano concertos by Castelnuovo-Tedesco in 2014.
In 2012, Massa went back to the studio to record the complete works for solo piano by Riccardo Zandonai (Crystal Classics, 2012): a world premiere.
The Piano Concerto No.1 in D minor by Giuseppe Martucci has been released in 2024. The publication of two further CDs with the Piano Concerto in A minor and the Toccata for piano and orchestra by Ottorino Respighi as well as the Divertimento "Scarlattiana" by Alfredo Casella, a cooperation between DeutschlandRadio, the label Myricae Classics and international distribution of Naxos USA, is scheduled for 2025.
The concert career has taken Pietro Massa around the world for appearances with renowned orchestras under the baton of such conductors as Peter Hirsch and Christian Kunert (Germany), Christoph-Mathias Mueller (Switzerland), Othmar Mága (Czech Republic), Felix Carrasco (Mexico), Ender Sakpinar (Turkey), Vitaly Kutzenko (Ukraine) and Abzal Mukhitdinov (Kazakhstan).
His repertoire of piano concertos performed with orchestra consists of 28 works.
Pietro Massa regularly gives concerts as a soloist in Germany, notably piano recitals in Berlin (Philharmonie and Konzerthaus), Hamburg (Laeiszhalle), Munich (Gasteig), Dusseldorf (Tonhalle and Robert Schumann Hall), Nürnberg (Meistersingerhalle) and Stuttgart (Liederhalle).
He is the Managing Director of Massa Konzertmanagement Berlin, the agency that represents him worldwide.
Pietro Massa, studied piano, composition and classical philology with a focus on Greek studies. After completing his degrees in these three disciplines, he continued his studies in Germany from 1999 onwards and obtained his PhD in Musicology from the Free University of Berlin in 2005.
Since 2023, he works as a Visting Researcher for the Institute of Musicology of the
Humboldt University Berlin at a postdoctorate publication with title “History and Aesthetics of Italian Piano Music”.
The research project examines the interactions between opera and piano history in Italy, partly through the analysis of unpublished documents from the archives of individual composers, to reconstruct the stylistic development of piano compositions from this new perspective.
(Peter Lang – Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2006)
Freie Universität Berlin | German
Pietro Massa, „Antikerezeption und musikalische Dramaturgie in Die Backantinnen (1931) von Egon Wellesz“, in: „Das (Musik-)Theater in Exil und Diktatur“ (Vorträge und Gespräche des Salzburger Symposions 2003) | German
Pietro Massa, „Flug und Ekstase in Alexander Skrjabins Tonsystem. Gedankenwelt und Visionen eines Mystikers“, in: „Resonanzprozesse zwischen Werk und Biografie“ (Jahrbuch für Psychoanalyse und Musik, 2021) | German
