After graduating with highest honors from the Conservatory of Genoa, MARCO RAPETTI furthered his musical studies at the Conservatory of Florence, the Chigiana Academy in Siena, the Perosi Academy in Biella and in the United States as a Fulbright student. His main teachers were Massimiliano Damerini, Aldo Ciccolini, Seymour Lipkin, Rosalyn Tureck, the Trio di Trieste and the Juilliard Quartet. At the Juilliard School of New York he received his Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees (with a dissertation on cognitive psychology related to musical memory). He subsequently obtained a second PhD cum laude in musicology at the University of Florence.

Rapetti has been awarded several prizes in national and international competitions (amongst which the W. Kapell Competition in Washington and the RAI Chamber Music Competition for the European Year of Music) and has performed in Europe, America, Japan and Australia. In 1990 he played Stravinsky’s Concerto for two pianos with Jennifer Hayghe at New York Focus Festival in the presence of John Cage. In 1991 he took part in the Lincoln Center concert series for Mozart’s bicentennial, and, in 1994, he gave the world premiere of Reicha’s 36 Fugues (1805). For the 300th anniversary of the invention of the piano (1700-2000) he presented a lecture-recital on the history of Italian piano music from the time of Cristofori until the present day. A few days after 9/11, he gave a recital in the US for the victims of the attacks. In 2014 he was the soloist in the first modern performance of Hermann Levi’s Piano Concerto (1860). He has been a regular guest at the Chopin Festival in Paris and, more recently, at the Festival of Piano Rarities in Husum (Germany). In 2015 in both Florence and Washington he presented three programmes of music inspired by Dante and by the city of Florence. In duo with Massimiliano Damerini he has performed the transcription of Scriabin’s symphonies and has recorded Debussy’s complete works for two pianos and four hands.

Rapetti has made recordings for the Fonit-Cetra, Dynamic, Stradivarius, Frame, Phoenix Classics, Brilliant, and Naxos labels. With Brilliant he has published a series of complete recordings of piano music by French and Russian composers, including some unpublished pieces by Borodin, Liadov, and  Dukas, which he rediscovered at the St. Petersburg National Library and at the Library of Congress in Washington. With Naxos he has released the first recording of Busoni’s complete works for two pianos, together with Aldo Ciccolini and Aldo Orvieto. With the latter he has performed Mahler’s Seventh Symphony in the piano transcription by Alfredo Casella, later released on cd.

Rapetti has always shown a keen interest in the psychology of music and in the combination of different genres and different arts. His performances include: “Clazz-Jassical”: the black and the white continents confront each other, performed in duo with jazz pianist Mauro Grossi, From Mozart to Rzewski: two centuries of music and words in the name of Freedom, with actress Pamela Villoresi, “Onirofonie”: concert-lecture on music in dreams and dreams in music, with psychologist Valeria Uga, From Broadway to Via Larga: a “musical” promenade between Florence and New York, together with jazz singer Faye Nepon, “Kitsch-Klavier”: an anthology of bad taste from Badaržewska to the New Age, in collaboration with the famous art critic and philosopher Gillo Dorfles.

At 21 he started teaching at the Conservatory of Milan and at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole (Florence). He later worked as an accompanist and piano coach at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena and at the Juilliard School as an assistant of Beverley Peck Johnson and Nico Castel. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii and at the conservatories of Eisenstadt, Sydney, Las Palmas, Seville, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. He is currently a full-time professor at the Conservatory of Florence.

Rapetti has published pedagogical and musicological articles in specialized music magazines, such as Piano Time, Il Giornale della Musica, Musica Domani, Il Paganini. His book Scriabin and the Sound-Light, edited with Luisa Curinga, was published in 2018 by Florence University Press.

As a radio speaker and performer he has collaborated with the Italian Broadcast Company (RAI - RadioTre) and with Radio Toscana Classica.

In 2019 he took part in the International Conference on Music Analysis and Theory in Rimini, where he presented his reconstruction of Scriabin’s E flat minor Sonata based on the original manoscript. The following year he was selected to participate in the European Music Analysis Conference (EuroMAC) held at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. In 2021 he was invited to participate in the International Academic Conference on synaesthesia and the synthesis of the arts organized by the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory of St. Petersburg. In 2022 he took part in the GATM Conference held in Salerno, presenting a study on Henrique Oswald and nationalism in Brazilian music.  

In 1997 he was awarded the City of Genoa Prize at Palazzo Tursi. In 2023 he has been elected an honorary member of the prestigious Accademia delle Arti e del Disegno of Florence.