Fabrizio Festa (1960) began his piano musical studies in classical repertoire. Very early he devoted his attention to jazz, studying piano, composition and arrangement with some of the best Italian jazz player (as Enrico Pieranunzi, Franco D’Andrea, Giancarlo Gazzani) and with the pianist and composer Mal Waldron. With his jazz band, Festa Group, Fabrizio Festa toured in Italy and in Europe, and the band has been invited twice to the International Jazz Festival of Montreux.
In 2000 the band made is debut in USA with a great success. Festa Group recorded two LP and two CD: mostly of the compositions are by Fabrizio Festa himself.
He studied at the Conservatorio “G.B. Martini” in Bologna as a composer and in the class of jazz orchestra arrangement.
Since 1989 Fabrizio Festa devotes his musical work mostly to composition (chamber and symphonic music, ballet, opera, radiodrama), although he composed and composes for cinema, TV movies and for theatre shows, and in 1996 he played again piano in a his new jazz band.
In 1998 he made his debut as conductor.
His works has been performed in Italy, USA (New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, etc.), Germany, Russia, Holland, French, Swedish, Lebanon, Turkey, Azerbaijan and Latin America. Some of the most important Italian theatre (i.e., Teatro dell’Opera - Roma, Teatro Massimo - Palermo, Teatro Comunale - Bologna, Teatro Valli - Reggio Emilia) commissioned him symphonic music, ballet music and opera.
Fabrizio Festa teaches arrangement and orchestration at Bologna Conservatory. He teaches Music and Dance and he is assistant at the History of Modern and Contemporary Theater Chair at Music, Theater, Fine Arts Department of the University of Bologna.
Fabrizio Festa collaborates as music critic with “La Repubblica”. He his the editor of Musica Insieme magazine and a member of the National Association of Music Critics.