Riccardo Cecchetti, pianist and forte-pianist, is the founding member of various chamber music groups including the Trio Voces Intimae, which has played all over the world. After graduating cum laude from the Florence Conservatory, he began an intense concert career where he performed regularly in the most important concert halls worldwide – the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the Carnegie Hall and Frick Collection in New York, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Wigmore Hall and St. John’s Smith Square in London, the Musik Halle in Hamburg, the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, Vredenburg in Utrecht, Shenzhen Concert Hall in Shenzhen, Tianjin Concert Hall in Tianjin only to name a few, to which are added prestigious Festivals and Associations such as the Festival van Vlaanderen – B, Oude Muziek Festival – NL, Da Camera Society in Los Angeles, Oberlin College Oberlin – Ohio, the Festival dei due Mondi – Spoleto, Italy, the Festival in Granada, Spain, the Festival in Melbourne, Amici della Musica in Florence, Unione Musicale of Turin and the Istituzione Universitaria dei Concerti in Rome.
BBC Radio3, RAI-Radio3, WNYC New York City, Radio France, Radio Clásica – España, etc. broadcast his concerts.
Riccardo Cecchetti plays both period and modern pianos, placing particular emphasis on chamber and solo classical and early romantic repertoire played on period instruments. His repertoire ranges from 18th century music to contemporary music.
He has an exclusive recording contract with Challenge Records. His recording of the R. Schumann Piano Trios op.63 & 110 on period instruments was awarded as Period Instruments Choice by BBC Radio3 and CD del mese by Suonare news – A. Foletto. Warner Classics published two CDs dedicated to the seven trios of J.N. Hummel that have been awarded as the Critics CD of the year 2006 and CD of the week by BBC Radio3, Choice of the Month by BBC Music Magazine and Cdécisif by the Radio Suisse Romande. He also recorded four CDs for the Italian recording company Symphonia, all on period instruments, as well as two recordings for the Spanish label Verso.
He teaches chamber music and forte-piano at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole and holds piano, fortepiano and chamber music master classes in Italy, Spain and the USA.

Next to Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók was a third seminal innovator of European art music at the start of the twentieth century. Bartók, too, sought a way out of the deadlock of tonal music around 1900, and he found it in folk music. Initially, he tied in with the nationalistic tradition of Franz Liszt with his tone poem Kossuth, but eventually he found his own voice with the rediscovery of the music of Hungarian peasants. Together with Zoltán Kodály he was one of the first to apply the results of folkloric research into his own compositions. One major difference between him and composers of the 19th century, was that Bartók did not adjust to the system of tonality, but created his own musical idiom from folk music. Because of this, his composition style was flexible to other musical trends, without having to violate his own view points. For example, his two Violin sonates come close to Schoenberg's free expressionism, and after 1926 his music started to show neoclassicistic tendencies, comparable to Stravinsky's music. Bartók was not just interested in Hungarian folk music, but could appreciate musical folklore from all of the Balkan, Turkey and North-Africa as well.