born in Biella, studied piano, violin and composition before perfecting her piano studies with Maria Golia, Malcolm Frager and Pier Narciso Masi. She has won national and international piano competitions and scholarships. A tenured professor since 1995, she has been teaching at the Conservatory of Turin since 2007. She began her concert career in 1980 as a recitalist and soloist with orchestra; her interest in chamber music has since allowed her to be part of numerous ensembles and to acquire a vast chamber repertoire. Her concert activity has seen her perform across Europe in prestigious concert halls during important concert seasons. Since 1988 she has played in a duo with the cellist Sergio Patria, with whom she has extended this formation to a trio with Franco Mezzena.
Since 2000, in parallel to her concert career, Elena Ballario has been composing for various instrumental and vocal groups, transcribing orchestral and chamber works from difffferent periods, creating monographic programmes dedicated to Rossini, Verdi, operetta, fables in music, and opera, performed by the Nuovo Insieme Strumentale Italiano, of which she is the pianist. After these early transcriptions she has produced original works for piano solo, chamber ensembles and string orchestra. She composed original music to the fable Pinocchio, creating a musical comedy widely performed by the ensemble with Lorenzo Branchetti as narrator. The Nuovo Insieme Strumentale Italiano has recorded three albums of her original works and transcriptions. Her compositions have been included in the repertoire of numerous soloists and ensembles, and are performed regularly in Italy and abroad. Also active as a writer of published theoretical texts, she produced the textbook Scales and Arpeggios with Theoretical Introduction, now used in music conservatoires. She has recently undertaken a project to re-evaluate the unpublished repertoire of the Piedmontese composer Carlo Rossaro, kept in the Library of the Conservatory of Turin, resulting in a double CD for the Tactus label that has received glowing reviews in numerous music magazines. In addition to the Odradek Records release of Schubert’s Piano Trios with the Mezzena/Patria/Ballario Trio, she has recorded the complete Trios of Wolf- Ferrari for Brilliant Classics, and Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoffff Trios for the Dynamic label.
