Lucia Ronchetti has been appointed the Artistic Director of the Biennale Musica, Venice, and will be responsible for programming throughout the 2021-2024 editions.

Ronchetti is a leading Italian composer whose opera “Inferno” is set to premiere at the Oper Frankfurt in 2021. Her chamber opera “Pinocchios Abenteur” is set to appear at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. She is also working on a new opera with the Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf.

“As Artistic Director I’ll be inspired by Venice and its musical history – from being the cradle of vocal counterpoint with the experiments with the diffusion of the vocal sound in San Marco with the ‘Cori spezzati’ technique in the 1500’s, to Venice as the laboratory of new forms of baroque music theatre, the city where the first theatre became a public theatre (the San Cassiano in1637) and the Venice of today with its wealth of operatic and choral performances,” Ronchetti noted in a press statement. “By taking the Biennale Musica into the city’s historical spaces and creating connections with their history and contemporary practice I aim to stimulate understanding of the coexistence and the importance of the past and the present with the hope that something for the future will be created.”

The 2021 festival will focus on “Choruses: Dramaturgy of Vocal Sounds in Contemporary Music.” The 2022 edition is entitled “Out of the Stage: Action Concert Pieces and Site-Specific Music Theatre Experiences” while the 2023 festival is entitled “Micro-Music: The ‘Sound Object’ Past and New Frontiers in SoundTreatment and Diffusion.” Finally, the 2024 festival will be “Absolute Music: New Aesthetics of Absolute Music Language.”