Sandro De Palma

Sandro De Palma was born on 14 February 1957 in Cicciano, in the province of Naples. He was formed in the piano school of Vincenzo Vitale in Naples and later studied with Nikita Magaloff and Alice Kezeradze-Pogorelich. He gave his first public concert at the age of nine, playing Bach, Chopin and Schubert, and his first recording, devoted to Liszt, was made when he was sixteen.

At 19 he won first prize at the Alfredo Casella International Competition in Naples in 1976, shared with the German pianist Gerhard Oppitz. Two years later he won the first prize of the Bruce Hungerford Foundation in New York.

De Palma's concert career took him to many of the major stages of Europe and beyond. In 1983 he played the complete Chopin Etudes at the Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli International Piano Festival in Brescia and Bergamo, and in 1998 he made his debut at Wigmore Hall in London with Chopin's 24 Preludes. In 2000, at the invitation of Yuri Temirkanov, he played Liszt's First Piano Concerto with the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra.

In October 2001 he gave the first performance, with Andrea Bocelli and the pianist Ilia Kim under Donato Renzetti, of Azio Corghi's "...malinconia, ninfa gentile" for voice, two pianos and strings; Corghi later dedicated a suite drawn from the work to the two pianists. He played at the Berlin Philharmonie with the Quartetto Amarcorde and with strings of the Berlin Philharmonic, appeared at the Folle Journee in Nantes in 2004, 2005 and 2006, at La Roque d'Antheron and at the Beethoven festival in Bonn, played Salieri's C major concerto with the Orchestra of the Arena di Verona in 2009 and Brahms's Second Concerto at the Vienna Musikverein in 2010. He gave three concerts at Expo 2010 in Shanghai and toured China in 2012. In 2010 he received the Premio Cimarosa for championing the sonatas of Domenico Cimarosa.

A keen chamber musician, he performed all of Beethoven's violin sonatas and all of Brahms's chamber music. On record he took part in the first world recording of Muzio Clementi's Gradus ad Parnassum for Fonit Cetra, which won an Italian record critics' prize, and recorded Brahms, rare piano works by Francesco Cilea, and sonatas by Cimarosa and Domenico Scarlatti.

From 1999 to 2010 he was artistic director first of the musical association of the Teatro Bellini in Naples and then of the Maggio della Musica festival in Naples. He also programmed concerts for the 56th and 57th editions of the Festival of Spoleto. In 2000 he founded the Associazione Musicale Muzio Clementi, which he led as president and artistic director, creating the festival I Bemolli sono Blu in Viterbo and the Tuscia. In 2023 the association moved into the sixteenth century Palazzo Chigi in Viterbo.

De Palma kept close ties to Cicciano, the town near Nola where he was born, and in later life devoted much of his work to Viterbo. Little has been published about his private life. Tributes after his death were addressed to his family and to those close to him.

Sandro De Palma died in Rome on Saturday 24 October 2026, aged 69. Il Mattino reported that he had been suffering from an illness diagnosed less than a year earlier. The death was announced by the Associazione Musicale Muzio Clementi. Tributes came from the musical world and from Viterbo, where Alfonso Antoniozzi, the councillor responsible for the city's European Capital of Culture project, wrote of what the city owed him. His funeral was announced for Monday 26 October 2026 at 16.30 in the church of San Giacomo Apostolo in Piazza Giovanni XXIII, Cicciano.

Il Mattino described De Palma as one of the most precocious talents of the Naples piano school shaped by Vincenzo Vitale, and the critic Guido Zaccagnini called him one of the most interesting interpreters on the European scene. He is remembered for championing forgotten repertoire, from Clementi and Cimarosa to Cilea, and for the opportunities he gave young musicians through the Muzio Clementi association and the I Bemolli sono Blu festival.