Ponti was born in Freiburg im Breisgau;[1] his father was a U.S. diplomat, and his German mother later became an American citizen.
[3] While still attending school in Washington, D.C., he received piano lessons for ten years,[1] seven of them with Gilmour McDonald, who had studied with Leopold Godowsky.
[2] At age eleven, he played both volumes of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier in four recitals at the YMCA in Washington from memory.
[2][4] For his official New York debut, he played a recital at the Alice Tully Hall in March 1972,[2][4] and remembered: I started off with Beethoven Op.
[1][2] Ponti began recording in 1961, Ravel's Jeux d'eau and Alborada del gracioso for Christophorus and Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy and Beethoven's Eroica Variations.
[7] Composers of the series also included Mily Balakirev, Moritz Moszkowski, Hans Bronsart von Schellendorff, Clara Schumann and Sigismond Thalberg.
[3] He included works by Eugen d'Albert, William Berwald, Alexander Glazunov, Hermann Goetz, Ferdinand Hiller, Henry Litolff, Sergei Lyapunov, Nikolai Medtner, Joachim Raff, Carl Reinecke, Anton Rubinstein, Xaver Scharwenka, Christian Sinding, Bernhard Stavenhagen and Karl Tausig.
[2] With the Ponti-Zimansky-Polasek Trio, he recorded chamber music by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvořák, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.