Gabriele Ferro

Gabriele Ferro was born in Pescara, on Italy's Adriatic coast, on 15 November 1937. His father, Pietro Ferro, was a composer, and music was part of his life from the start.

He studied at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he graduated in piano and composition in 1960. He then went to the Netherlands to attend the conducting courses that Franco Ferrara gave with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in Hilversum, and he went on to become Ferrara's pupil.

From 1965 until its closure in 1992, Ferro was one of the conductors of the RAI Alessandro Scarlatti chamber orchestra in Naples. In 1968 the Bari Symphony Orchestra began its activity under his artistic direction, at a time when he was teaching at the Niccolo Piccinni conservatory in Bari, then directed by Nino Rota.

In 1970 he began working with the orchestras of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and La Scala, and he won the RAI competition for young conductors. That began a long association with the RAI National Symphony Orchestra in Rome, of which he was principal conductor from 1987 to 1991, while from 1979 to 1997 he was resident conductor of the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana. Between 1974 and 1980, at Claudio Abbado's invitation, he conducted a number of concerts at La Scala, and from 1974 to 1982 he led a series of symphonic concerts for Radio France with the Orchestre National de France at the Salle Pleyel in Paris.

He was Generalmusikdirektor of the Staatstheater in Stuttgart from 1991 to 1997, music director of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples from 1999 to 2004, and principal guest conductor of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo from 2001 to 2006. He returned to Palermo as music director from 2014 to 2019, and in 2020 the Teatro Massimo named him honorary music director.

Ferro conducted at La Fenice, the Rome Opera, the Opera Bastille, the Theatre du Chatelet, the Grand Theatre de Geneve, the Bavarian State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Teatro Real in Madrid and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, as well as the Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera and Los Angeles Opera. He led the Vienna Symphony, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the BBC Symphony and the Cleveland Orchestra. Alongside the classical repertoire he was a committed interpreter of contemporary music, conducting works by Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Gyorgy Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Wolfgang Rihm. In opera he worked with singers such as Montserrat Caballe, Cecilia Bartoli, Edita Gruberova and Samuel Ramey, and with directors including Luca Ronconi, Achim Freyer and Emma Dante. He recorded for EMI, Erato, Deutsche Grammophon and Sony, and taught conducting at the Fiesole School of Music.

Ferro was the son of the composer Pietro Ferro, and he was a composer as well as a conductor. He spent much of his later career in Palermo and was an academician of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He kept conducting into his late eighties.

Gabriele Ferro died in Palermo on 29 October 2026. He would have turned 89 on 15 November. The cause of death was not made public.

Just weeks earlier, on 11 October, he had stepped onto the podium of the Teatro Massimo's main hall for the last time, conducting the orchestra and children's choir in a programme in memory of the musicologist Paolo Emilio Carapezza, with music by Prokofiev and Stravinsky and his own work Sintropia n. 5. His funeral was set for Saturday 31 October at 10 o'clock at the church of Santa Lucia in Palermo.

The Teatro Massimo remembered him as a musician who embodied music as thought, memory and vision. The mayor of Palermo, Roberto Lagalla, said his death left a great void in the world of music and in the cultural life of the city, and Italy's Ministry of Culture also issued a message of condolence.

Ferro is remembered as one of the leading Italian conductors of his generation, equally at home in Rossini, Bellini and Verdi, in Richard Strauss and in the avant garde. His Elektra at the San Carlo in Naples, staged by Klaus Michael Gruber with designs by Anselm Kiefer, earned him the Franco Abbiati prize of the Italian music critics for 2002 to 2003, and the German magazine Opernwelt honoured his Stuttgart La Sonnambula in 2012 and his edition of Jommelli's Vologeso in 2015. In Palermo, where he served the Teatro Massimo across two decades, he is remembered as the theatre's honorary music director for life.