Bartolomeo Cristofori International Piano Festival 2026 “Rinascita”
From September 17 to 28, 2026 (withpreview performances on September 5 and 16 in Padua), the Bartolomeo Cristofori International Piano Festival, organized by the Bartolomeo Cristofori Association, returns. Now in its ninth edition, the Cristofori Festival pays tribute to the inventor of the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori, who was born in Padua in 1655 and invited to the Medici court to bring his revolutionary invention—the piano—to life.
The central theme of the 2026 edition is music as a force capable of bringing about a rebirth: of people, ideas, sounds, and instruments. Taking rebirth as its starting point, the Festival aims to tell the story of a return to the light through the stories of composers who found in music a way out—the rediscovery of forms and languages of the past projected toward the future.
Pianist in Residence
The 2026 Festival’s Pianist in Residence is Frenchman Lucas Debargue . Rising to international fame after the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, Debargue’s career path is among the most atypical and fascinating. Far from a child prodigy, after his early musical studies, Debargue completely distanced himself from music to devote himself to literary studies at university. Debargue didn’t return to playing until he was 20, simultaneously experimenting with classical repertoire and jazz improvisation, playing in Parisian cafés to support himself while studying. Completely unknown before the Tchaikovsky Competition, his unconventional style instantly earned him the attention of audiences and critics, so much so that he immediately signed an exclusive contract with Sony. Also active as a composer, at just 35 years old, Lucas Debargue is today one of the most powerful and multifaceted figures on the international music scene.
At Cristofori 2026, Debargue will open the Festival with Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto, accompanied by the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto conducted by Giuseppe Mengoli, the first Italian winner of the Mahler Competition in Bamberg, before moving on to a program that combines works by Rachmaninoff and Mussorgsky with his own Variations on Themes by Gershwin.
As a composer, he wrote the new Sonnet for solo piano for the fifth edition of the Petrarca Project, inviting pianist and composer Sandro Nebieridze—who won silver at the 2025 Busoni Competition, where Debargue himself served on the jury—to perform it.
