Davide Santacolomba
Piano recital
30 gennaio 2026 | ore 18:30
Italian Cultural Institute, 710 Sansome St, San Francisco
Event open to the public | Registration required
PROGRAM
Davide Santacolomba (from his album Desiderio)
Emergency | Mare Dentro | Desiderio | Valzer della Noia | Verso Te | Freedom Song |
Tesseract | Carovana nel deserto
Philip Glass
Selection of studies from Piano Etudes Nos. 5, 6, 9
DAVIDE SANTACOLOMBA
For Davide Santacolomba, music has never been a given, but a deliberate and radical choice. Deaf from a young age, he encountered skepticism early in his studies at the Alessandro Scarlatti Conservatory in Palermo, where he was told that a musical career would be impossible. Refusing to stop, he developed an alternative approach to sound based on imagination, bodily perception, musical logic, and the “ear of the mind.”
In 2013, at the age of 26, he underwent cochlear implant surgery, opening a new chapter in his relationship with sound. He graduated with top honors and was later selected—among more than one hundred international candidates—to continue his studies at the Conservatory of Italian Switzerland in Lugano, completing a specialization in performance and music pedagogy in 2019.
Santacolomba has since performed in major theaters and festivals across Europe, Asia, and the United States, collaborating with internationally renowned orchestras. In Poland, Chopin’s homeland, he achieved a world first as the first deaf musician with a cochlear implant to perform as a soloist with an orchestra. His story has been shared widely through television, TEDx talks, and international media.
Since 2021, he has taught piano in Italian conservatories and masterclasses throughout Europe. After completely losing his natural hearing in 2022, he transformed this limitation into a source of creativity. He is currently working on his first album of original music, Desiderio, a project that embodies his artistic vision: a tension toward an “elsewhere,” where silence becomes sound and fragility becomes expression.