Katia Pesti

Katia Pesti is a pianist and composer from Messina. After graduating in piano, she attended Guido Agosti’s advanced piano course at the Accademia Chigiana. She subsequently studied percussion with Christian Hamouy of Les Percussions de Strasbourg and attended Maurizio Ben Omar’s contemporary music seminars in Bologna. At the Vincenzo Bellini Music Institute in Catania, she studied electronic music with Alessandro Cipriani. She began working as a pianist-composer in the 1990s.

Her encounter with Balinese gamelan in Indonesia sparked a lasting interest in Asian music. She developed a compositional approach in which elements of classical music combine with the timbres of Balinese instruments, which she plays simultaneously with the piano in concert.

In August 2012 she was a finalist in the Franz Liszt Competition for Pianist-Composers, held as part of the Bellagio and Lake Como Festival in collaboration with the Centro di Musica Contemporanea in Milan and the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio. In 2013 she presented her compositions at Teatro Dal Verme in Milan for the new releases of Archivi del XXI Secolo.