The Unexpected Journey to Luca Francesconi's Composer Portrait

Miller Theatre commissioned writer Lara Pellegrinelli to create the program notes for the Composer Portraits in the 2022-23 season as well as a series of Q&As with Executive Director Melissa Smey. Here is the second installment, centering around our next Portrait featuring the music of Luca Francesconi.

Q. You’ve made multiple attempts to present a Composer Portrait of Luca Francesconi, which had to be postponed twice last year. Is the third time the charm?

A. I hope so! Luca and the musicians have been waiting for this to happen for so very long now. I’m going to put it out into the universe that this portrait must finally happen.

Luca lives in Italy, and the travel situation was constantly evolving last year. We had originally planned his portrait for April of 2021, but that entire live season had to be reframed because of COVID. We postponed to February 2022, but then the entire campus was shut down for the month of January because of the Omicron variant. So we had to make the difficult decision to postpone it again.

Q. You often need to wait for the right opportunity to present a given composer from your wish list for the series. Apart from pandemic delays, how long have you wanted to work with Luca, and what brought this concert about?

A. I first encountered his music rather a long time ago—when I was an intern at the Lincoln Center Festival. Then, a few years ago, he was a guest in the Department of Music, where he gave an open lecture. He was gregarious, funny and warm—also intense and strong in his opinions.

But this concert came about in part because of Luca’s relationship with Brad Lubman, the co-artistic director of Ensemble Signal. Ensemble Signal is perhaps best known for its Steve Reich projects. Brad and Luca have known each other for almost 20 years.

Brad has a remarkable reputation as a conductor. He has an academic home at the Eastman School of Music, where he teaches and conducts an ensemble, and he also has a career in Europe, which has given him a deep connection to new music on the continent and composers like Luca. Ensemble Signal was invited to do a concert at the Library of Congress featuring works whose manuscript scores belong to the library. Lauren Radnofsky, Brad’s co-artistic/executive director and an amazing cellist, suggested Luca for a commission. And that was the genesis of Trauma Études, which premiered at the Library of Congress in 2018. Our concert is the New York premiere.

Q. Can you talk a bit about Luca’s career as a composer?

A. It’s significant. Luca has had major commissions and performances—for the BBC Proms and at La Scala, among others. He was the artistic director for the Venice Biennale for four years. He founded the AGON Institute for music research in Milan. He’s published by Casa Ricordi, the oldest of European publishers of music. He was Luciano Berio’s assistant.

But Europe is different than the United States. He’s a really important composer, and yet his work is not so well known in the United States. Unexpected End of Formula, the other work on the program, was written in 2008 and this is its U.S. premiere.

Q. Luca seems to be writing in part as a response to composers of the post-war generation like Berio. Is that your understanding of his music?

A. I find that he's along the continuum of Berio and Stockhausen, with whom he studied. There’s something technical, something very exacting, a precise control over systems and processes. There’s a concision in his writing, which does not mean he isn’t capable of expansiveness or emotion.

I’ll be hearing the music on this program for the first time with the audience. Unexpected End of Formula, which will feature Lauren Radnofsky on cello, is dedicated to Helmut Lachenmann, another important post-war composer, who developed what is called instrumental musique concrète. We did a Lachenmann Portrait with Ensemble Signal in 2010, which Lauren had proposed. It was actually the first Composer Portrait concert I produced in my role as Executive Director.

Something that I look forward to exploring with Luca in our on-stage conversation is what Trauma Études means before and after COVID. The idea that's explored is the spectacle of trauma in contemporary society as opposed to our inability to look directly at actual trauma. Does this mean something different given everything that has happened in the world since that work had its premiere four years ago?