Alberto Zedda was born in 1928 in Milan, where he began his humanistic and musical studies. In 1957 he won the RAI International Conductors Competition, a success that opened the door for him to the most important Italian institutions, La Scala, Santa Cecilia, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, RAI, and abroad in Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Israel, the United States, China and Japan. At the same time he was continually involved in opera at La Scala (Milan), San Carlo (Naples), La Fenice (Venice), Teatro Massimo (Palermo), Teatro Comunale (Bologna), Covent Garden, the Mariinsky, and the Vienna State Opera, as well as in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Prague, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Lisbon, Barcelona and Madrid. His many recordings include orchestral and chamber music, as well as opera.

He has taught the History of Music at the University of Urbino and Musical Philology at the Osimo Accademia. He dedicates part of his time to musicology and has produced critical editions of operas, oratorios and cantatas, with particular attention to Rossiniand music of the first half of the nineteenth century. He has served as director of Italian repertory at The New York City Opera and has been a member of the Editorial Committee of the Rossini Foundation since its establishment. He has also been musical director of the Festival della Valle D’Itria of Martina Franca, artistic advisor of the Pesaro Rossini Opera Festival,artistic advisor for the La Coruña Mozart Festival, artistic director of the Genoa Carlo Felice and the Milan La Scala theatres, and of the Baroque Festival of Fano.

He is currently director of the Pesaro Rossini Opera Festival and Honorary President of the German Rossini Society. He is probably the most experienced expert on and conductor of Rossini of our time, and therefore also an unsurpassed teacher for young singers, whom he teaches at his Accademia Rossiniana in Pesaro, but also in master-classes throughout the world and often at Wildbad. At his early début with the New York Philharmonic he came across some unplayable passages in the published edition of the Overture to Il bariere di Siviglia, thus unearthing the carelessness of tradition. In the 1960s he revised the score from the autograph, thus marking the beginning of modern, philologically exact Rossini scholarship and the now legendary Rossini revival. First in the 1970s, however, he was acknowledged as a true Rossinian, grasping as no other the range of the abstract form and individual meaning in Rossini’s music. Since 1998, when he studied Il viaggio a Reims at the tenth festival with a group of outstanding young singers from all over the world, he has conducted many times at Jochen Schönleber’s "Rossini in Wildbad" Festival and undertaken a number of recording projects for Naxos.