About
Over the past several years Marco Crispo’s contagious enthusiasm and driving personality has brought him to the close attention of audiences and orchestras.
First noticed for his work as an assistant for the Opéra National de Montpellier, for the Royal Danish Opera and for the Festival de Radio France, Marco Crispo - an Italian conductor based in Copenhagen - opened the Operaen i Midten 22/23 season with Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol. Recently he has worked on both Italian and French repertoire including Verdi’s Falstaff and La Traviata, Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Don Giovanni, Thomas’ Hamlet, to mention but a few.
In the 23/24 season Marco conducts Tosca in Copenhagen with Lyngby-Taarbæk Symphony Orchestra, Hänsel und Gretel at the Landestheater in Coburg, Il Turco in Italia at the Teatro Sociale in Rovigo and at the Teatro Dante Alighieri in Ravenna with the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini. The following year Marco will return to Operaen i Midten to conduct the Danish premiere of Cericola’s opera Pinocchio.
“ Talented, intellectually perspicacious and dedicated ”
Esa-Pekka Salonen
His recent highlights in the Nordic countries include his debut with the South Jutland Symphony Orchestra in Denmark, his concert with Odense Symphony Orchestra, the Fiskars Summer Festival in Finland and at the Baltic Sea Festival alongside Esa-Pekka Salonen in Sweden, where celebrated artists are invited to help promote unity and ecological awareness.
Marco has a natural, boundless, and unconditional relationship with music, which he has also expressed in his work as an arranger. His works for the Bron Chamber Orchestra have been performed in concert halls such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, and the Tonhalle Zürich by internationally acclaimed musicians such as Maxim Vengerov and Daniel Hope. Thanks to Crispo being an advocate for discovery and inclusion of new music into the standard repertoire, a great deal of new music has been performed for the first time in Scandinavia, such as the music of Bettinelli (NMH, Oslo 2019) and Di Bari’s (Odense Symphony Orchestra, 2021).
Having always been greatly passionate about promoting awareness and education in classical music, Crispo has initiated several projects in Sicily: the establishment of the “Josè Antonio Abreu” youth orchestra and choir, which brought together disadvantaged children and offered free music lessons and the free loan of instruments, and raising funds and co-organising an academy of music for the growth of local musical education. Even outside of his native Italy, Crispo still keeps his bond to education and community having also been invited to join the Swedish Young Musicians Academy (YOMA) and Polstjärnepriset as a guest member.
Crispo’s commitment to contemporary music, support to young composers, and his dedication to research were rewarded with the offer of Fellowship by “Cortona Sessions for New Music'', by the “Fondation Idella” and by the “Margrethe Axel Fond”. Crispo was selected as one of the candidates of the Norwegian program “Dirigentforum 2018-20”.
Graduated with honors in classical guitar at the “A. Corelli” Conservatory in Messina, Crispo studied composition at the International Academy Foundation “Incontri col maestro” of Imola, and attended “Musicology and Musical Heritage” at the “Ca’ Foscari” University of Venice and at the University of Padua. After studying conducting with Donato Renzetti in Italy, he continued his studies at the Norwegian Academy of Music and at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, where he graduated from the Advanced Postgraduate program under the guidance of Giordano Bellincampi and Michael Schønwandt.
Crispo was selected to join the class of Daniele Gatti at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, and to participate to the Fiskars Festival where he was guided by Hannu Lintu, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Jukka-Pekka Saraste, to whom he owes his recent artistic development.
