Son of the artist Marc, Federico Maria Sardelli founded the baroque orchestra Modo Antiquo in 1984 with which he performs in Europe as a soloist and conductor at ancient musica festivals. He is guest conductor of several symphonic orchestras, including the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the Gewandhausorchester of Leipzig, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra of Rome, the Kammerakademie Potsdam, the Réal Filarmonia de Galicia, the Arena di Verona Orchestra. Since 2006 he has been the principal guest conductor of the Orchestra Filarmonica di Torino. In 2005, he conducted the world premiere of Vivaldi's opera Motezuma at the Concertgebouw in Rotterdam, rediscovered after 270 years. In 2006 he conducted the world premiere of Vivaldi's opera Atenaide at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence. In 2007 he was principal conductor of the Händel Festspiele in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, where he directed the opera Ariodante. In 2009, in Verona, he directed the first performance in modern times of the opera Il mondo alla rovescia by Antonio Salieri. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Istituto Italiano Antonio Vivaldi at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, for which he published the volume La musica per flauto di Antonio Vivaldi (Olschki, 2002), which was translated into English by Michael Talbot (Ashgate, 2007). In July 2007 Peter Ryom commissioned him to continue his monumental work of cataloguing Antonio Vivaldi's music and, since then, Federico Maria Sardelli has been responsible for the Vivaldi Werkverzeichnis. His annual updates to the Catalogue are regularly published in the Giorgio Cini Foundation's  Studi vivaldiani magazine. In February 2011 he directed Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali by Donizetti, produced by the L.T.L. OperaStudio Project of the theatres of Pisa, Lucca and Livorno. In 2012 he recorded the second volume of the "Vivaldi New Discoveries" for Naïve, which contains 7 unpublished Vivaldian songs. Also in 2012 he rediscovered and attributed to Vivaldi the opera Orlando Furioso (RV 819), performing it in its world premiere at the Festival d'Opéra Baroque de Beaune and recording it for Naïve records.