The Italian fortepianist Costantino Mastroprimiano has specialized in music of the 19th century, a relatively unusual field for historical keyboardists. He has focused on such composers as Muzio Clementi, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Jan Ladislav Dussek, Johann Baptist Cramer, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Carl Czerny, Ignaz Moscheles, and Ferdinand Ries. Many of his performances have been buttressed by his own research into historical instruments and playing techniques. Mastroprimiano was born on October 28, 1964 in Foggia, Italy. His undergraduate studies took place at the conservatory there, and he moved on for further work in piano and chamber music at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana, earning degrees in 1984 and 1985, respectively. He then launched into studies of period piano treatises and in the process rediscovered not only works by the above-named composers and others, but also hitherto unpublished transcriptions of orchestral music by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and he served on the committee that produced a complete edition of Clementi's works. Mastroprimiano has performed in major Italian cities and various foreign countries (including France, Bulgaria, and Austria), and in Italy, with the Perugia Symphony Orchestra and others, he has performed solo parts in concertos. In 1996, at the San Gimignano Festival, he gave what was probably the first performance in history of Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, on fortepiano. Mastroprimiano also plays chamber music frequently, with the groups Hausmusikensemble and Concert sans Orchestre. He has recorded complete cycles of the keyboard music of Clementi and Hummel, and has also recorded the music of Chopin and Alkan on period instruments. His Hummel cycle appeared in complete form in 2018 on the Brilliant label. Mastroprimiano is on the faculty at the Accademia Europea Villa Bossi in Bodio Lomnago, Lombardy, and, in chamber music, at the University of Perugia. He has also served as guest professor at the National Academy of Music in Sofia, Bulgaria. ~ James Manheim