Luca Francesconi
[5] Francesconi returned to the Conservatory of Milan in 1974, while he was still attending the Berchet Classical Languages High School, and explored the musical landscape, taking an interest in different sounds.
Meanwhile, in Italy, thanks to a commission from the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, Francesconi had the opportunity to seriously put into practice for the first time his idea of a "polyphony of languages": Suite 1984.
[11] "In 1984 the Teatro Lirico in Cagliari presented a quartet made up of the pianist and composer Franco D'Andrea together with the group Africa Djolé led by the master percussionist Fode Youla from Guinea.
"[12] "Orchestra, African percussionists and jazz quintet: the choice of instrumental make-up itself contained in an explicit manner the generative nucleus of one of the principal aesthetic motors of the music of Luca Francesconi: the tendency to place alongside one another, following the rules of contrast and fusion, sounds and languages of highly diverse origins.
This meeting proved extremely important; talking with the great Verona composer, both in their public conversations and during train trips together, Francesconi felt that he reached a solution for a number of unresolved problems.
[11] Plot in Fiction, for oboe and cor anglais or clarinet and chamber group (1986), constructs its sonoric line around key notes within a rigorous formal framework.
[14] The piece was performed for the first time at the Festival Musica '900 in Trent by Ensemble Musique Oblique under the direction of Sandro Gorli; the soloist was Diego Dini Ciacci.
[17] Mambo, for solo piano, is Francesconi's most jazz-like piece, and it reveals clearly his search for an ever-uneasy equilibrium between sonoric materials, gathered in their primitive state, and the evocative power of history, from which the composer cannot remove himself.
[17] Handling electronics also serves, according to Francesconi, to recuperate a physical, auditive approach to musical composition, which, if limited to paper and pencil, runs the risk of becoming too speculative, weakening the direct relationship with the sonoric material.
"[20] The work was commissioned by Radio France and the world premiere took place in Paris on 14 January 1992: Asko Ensemble; conductor: Denis Cohen, and soloist: Irvine Arditti.
The great challenge is to maintain in the composer the two levels, the compositional and the emotive, and to ensure that these continually charge each other with responsibility for the form of the work up until in the end they arrive at a balanced result.
[6] The result is a multi-levelled organism that in 25 minutes lays out its basic material (phonemes, instrumental particles, electronic transformation) and then proceeds to join it all together in increasingly complex structures.
[24] A fuoco (1995) is Francesconi's fourth study on memory; Animus, for trombone and computer (1996), was performed in Paris, while the London Sinfonietta took Plot in fiction to Santa Cecilia in Rome (1996).
The effort to formalise creative thought and thought as a whole is extremely important for composers as well, but by the same token the "analogical" and qualitative approach of the artist helps to play down their relationship with technological instruments and above all to reaffirm the impossibility of discretising, quantifying human experience; the impossibility of converting into binary code and sending via fibre optic cable the sum total of existence, the totality of aesthetic experience, of the body, of affection, of the world.
"A single movement of twenty-three minutes for large orchestra divided into parallel – at times counterpoised – groups begins with a pianissimo of metallic gleams that emanate alternately from the two sides of the stage.
[26] From 1985 to the present Luca Francesconi has composed eight works of a theatrical stamp, from Scene, on a text by Umberto Fiori, to the chamber opera In Ostaggio, from Lips, Eyes Bang, for actress/singer, twelve instruments and live audio/video, to the video-opera Striaz.
[17] In the end, however, the collaboration did not eventuate for reasons of language (Sting did not feel up to singing and acting in Italian), but the idea remained of a present-day narrator who, like the ancient mariner, is condemned to wander around the globe in search of someone to whom to recount his incredible adventures, from shipwreck to the glaciers of the South Pole, from the scorching sun of the equator to the appearance of monsters and a phantomatic sailing ship.
"Luca Francesconi develops an orchestral writing that is inventive, sensual and seductive all at the same time, deftly integrating electronic resources elaborated by Ircam.
Francesconi, who had been known for more dramatic or tragic work, composed music that employed a wide variety of styles, including jazz, avant-garde, and canzonetta, in a parodic manner.
An adaptation of a text by Heiner Müller drawn in its turn from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 1782 novel Les liaisons dangereuses, it was jointly commissioned by Teatro alla Scala, Wiener Festwochen and Ircam.
Two casts alternated for the ten performances (Leigh Melrose and Kristin Chávez; and Mark Stone and Angelica Voje) on the metallic structures of a post-atomic bunker realised by Soutra Gilmour, with lighting by Bruno Poet and videos by Ravi Deepres projected onto tattered screens dropped from above in the restrained atmosphere of the Linbury Studio.
The La Fura del Baus production was performed again in Buenos Aires, Colón Theater, in June 2015, with Allison Cook and Robin Adams, director Alex Olle, conductor Brad Lubman.
This was the basic idea behind Exit, the celebratory evening/night that brought each of the four festivals to a close, transforming the Teatro alle Tese into a distended human body (Exit 02), "an experience with variable geometry, a new way of living space, sound and time from sunset to dawn",[38] or inviting the public to take a boat towards the Island of San Michele to pay homage to Stravinsky in the form of three clarinet pieces at his tomb and to then participate in a banquet that evoked the finale of Don Giovanni.
The spectator, as if he were to enter into a huge gallery and to decide autonomously how and what to look at, will have before his eyes a plurality of musical, scenic, theatrical and visual events to combine, putting aside the perceptive habits of space and time.
As the title suggests, Francesconi's concerto takes the idea of the Duende, the dark, demonic spirit of flamenco, as its starting point, but the music never seems simplistically pictorial or programmatic.
The orchestra weaves febrile webs around solo writing whose cracked arpeggios and steep scales manage to be more or less traditionally virtuosic within musical contexts that are anything but conventional, especially in the ferocious cadenza at the heart of the final movement.
Josefowicz's playing was immensely committed and astoundingly vivid, and it emerged in even sharper, more subtle focus in the Radio 3 recording, which also resolved many of the textures that had seemed rather blurred in the hall.»[41] Duende was ranked number 6 in the Guardian's list of the top 10 classical concerts and operas of 2015[42] "Curious, that title, 'Dentro non ha tempo'.
[43] Commissioned by the Teatro alla Scala for the Strauss cycle, Dentro non ha tempo, for large orchestra, is dedicated to Luciana Abbado Pestalozza, Francesconi's deceased friend who, with her sensibility and organisational capacity, played a crucial role in the development of contemporary music in Italy.
The 'vertical invader' to which the title refers is a metaphor for a connection that is true and profoundly desired – as opposed to the false relationships presented by mass media – a synchronicity that in music is as perennially elusive as it is in the world.
"[45] On 3 October at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, Sir Antonio Pappano together with the soprano Pumeza Matshikiza and the Orchestra and Choir of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, performed the world premiere of Bread, Water and Salt on texts by Nelson Mandela.
