Marco Sinopoli is a Rome-based guitarist, pianist, composer and arranger who grew up in a family of classical musicians: his father was the conductor and composer Giuseppe Sinopoli, who died in 2001 while conducting Verdi's Aida at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, and his mother is the pianist Silvia Cappellini. Sinopoli has said he grew up hearing his mother practice Bach and Mozart every day, but that his own first instrument, at around age 13, was electric guitar played in a rock and metal style. He began formal classical and electric guitar study in 1998, taking jazz courses at the Accademia Romana di Musica and the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia under M. C. Carfagna. He went on to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston in 2003 and at the Saint Louis College of Music in Rome in 2004, deepening his jazz harmony and improvisation with several of Italy's leading teachers, and later studied classical composition with A. Cusatelli and jazz piano and ensemble playing with Ramberto Ciammarughi, whom he has named as his single most formative influence.

He first performed alongside a name jazz audiences would recognize at 19, in 2004, sharing a bill with trumpeter Fabrizio Bosso and his own quartet at a festival hosted by the Accademia Filarmonica Romana. Over the following two decades he built a career as a working guitarist across jazz and pop, naming among his collaborators Fabrizio Bosso, Roberto Gatto, flautist Nicola Stilo, Federica Michisanti, Javier Girotto, singer-pianist Sergio Cammariere, Lino Patruno, Peppino Gagliardi, Francesco Di Giacomo and Primiano Di Biase, alongside session and arranging work in the studio. None of these collaborations is tied to a specific Discogs-indexed recording under his own name; see Personnel & Collaborations below for what can and cannot be independently verified. Alongside performing, he has composed music for theatrical productions, short films, advertising and documentaries, and has held composition commissions from institutions including Nuova Consonanza, the Macerata Arena Sferisterio, the Accademia Filarmonica Romana and the Fondazione Paolo Grassi.

In 2017 or 2018, depending on the source, Sinopoli founded Extradiction, an ensemble built around a jazz quartet (himself on electric guitar, Alessandro Gwis on piano, Toto Giornelli on bass and Alessandro Marzi on drums) paired with a classical woodwind trio (Bruno Paolo Lombardi on flute, Luca Cipriano on clarinet and Fabio Gianolla on bassoon). The group's debut album, Chromatic Landscape, was released in 2021 on Parco della Musica Records, the label run by Rome's Auditorium Parco della Musica, with flautist Nicola Stilo guesting on the track "Reminescences." The Auditorium's own catalog lists the record under its Jazz productions, alongside labelmates including Giovanni Falzone and Federica Michisanti. In March 2023 the Global Music Awards gave Chromatic Landscape a Gold Medal in its Crossover Jazz category. In 2019 Sinopoli had already won the Macerata Opera Festival's international prize as a composer, for the musical-theater work "Can you heart me?," staged at the Sferisterio Festival and the Roma Europa Festival. In 2022 he formed a second, quintet-format group, the Marco Sinopoli 5et, playing both piano and guitar alongside soprano saxophonist Simone Alessandrini, clarinetist Luca Cipriano, bassist Marco Siniscalco and drummer Evita Polidoro. In 2023 he was appointed an advisor for composition to the American Academy in Rome.

Sinopoli has also carried his father's musical legacy forward directly: for the 20th anniversary of Giuseppe Sinopoli's death in 2021, he re-orchestrated excerpts from his father's opera Lou Salomé for a reduced ensemble (published by Ricordi) and prepared a reduction of Pour un livre à Venise, for planned tribute concerts in Dresden and at Rome's Teatro Argentina that were disrupted by the pandemic. In November 2026 he returns to that thread with "Après Ravel," a new Extradiction program built around his own arrangement of the second movement of Ravel's String Quartet, premiering on November 18, 2026 at the Teatro Toniolo in Mestre alongside the unveiling of a statue honoring Giuseppe Sinopoli in his father's native city.

Sinopoli describes his own music as deliberately "transversal" rather than belonging to one camp: Extradiction pairs a classical woodwind trio with a jazz rhythm section specifically so that "classical" and "jazz" musicians can share a stage without either side simply accompanying the other. He has said improvisation matters to the project mainly for the interplay it creates between players rather than as a vehicle for solos, and that composed material is rarely just a launching pad for improvising. All About Jazz lists him under Jazz Guitar but tags his work Crossover Music, Contemporary Composition, Progressive Jazz and Avant Garde in the same breath, and the Global Music Awards placed Chromatic Landscape in a dedicated Crossover Jazz category rather than a straight jazz one. His own list of favorite composers spans Beethoven, Messiaen, Ligeti, Bach, Mahler and Brahms alongside Frank Zappa, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny and Metallica, which maps onto the two sides of his training: classical composition studied formally in Rome, and jazz guitar and improvisation studied at Berklee and the Saint Louis College of Music in Rome under some of Italy's own jazz teachers.