Skip to content
Siete qui: Home Festival Artisti Luca Francesconi
Luca Francesconi PDF Print E-mail
francesconi.jpgLuca Francesconi studied piano at the Conservatory of Milan and composition with Azio Corghi, Karlheinz Stockhausen (in Boston and Rome) and Luciano Berio (at Tanglewood). In 1990 he founded Agon Acustica Informatica Musica, a centre for production and musical research with new technologies based in Milan.
Among the many prizes and international awards he has received are the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (Darmstadt), the Förderpreis der Ernst-von-Siemens-Musikstiftung (Munich) and the Prix Italia for Ballata del rovescio del mondo, a radio opera with texts by Umberto Fiori (1994).
Many important international institutions have programmed concerts dedicated exclusively to his music. He has so far written over fifty works for very different forces (ranging from a soloist to a large orchestra), many commissioned by leading musical institutions and radio corporations.
His electronic and vocal music includes Etymo for soprano, chamber orchestra and electronic device, commissioned by Ircam, and Sirene/Gespenster, a pagan oratorio for four female choirs, percussion, brass and electronics. The wind music includes a quintet (Attesa), an octet (Aria), an instrumental suite from Monteverdi's Orfeo, and a huge work for five moving windbands (Mittel). He has also written two works for large orchestra: Wanderer for the Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala, conducted by Riccardo Muti, and Cobalt, Scarlet for the Oslo-Filharmonien (subsequently played also by the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Roberto Abbado in 2003 and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France conducted by Kazushi Ono in 2004). The choral music includes Terre del rimorso for soloists, chorus and orchestra, composed for the Festival Musica of Strasbourg 2001 and conducted by Eötvös, and Let me Bleed for the New London Chamber Choir.
Works dated 2002 are Buffa Opera, commissioned and produced by the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, and Ballata on a libretto by Umberto Fiori (after Coleridge's Ballad of the Ancient Mariner), commissioned by the Théâtre de la Monnaie of Brussels and directed by Achim Freyer.
In 2004 the Holland Festival commissioned Gesualdo Considered as a Murderer, a chamber opera composed to a text by Vittorio Sermonti and directed by Giorgio Barberio Corsetti.
The year 2004 also saw the premiere of Rest, 'Luciano Berio in memoriam', for cello and orchestra commissioned by the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della Rai, written for the soloist Anssi Karttunen and conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste.
He regularly collaborates with the world's leading musicians and international orchestras. He also conducts.
He teaches and is at present head of the department of composition at the Musikhögskolan of Malmö in Sweden.