The Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti, current director of the Venice Music Biennale, receives the Louis Spohr Prize in Brunswick.
Lucia Ronchetti, director of the Venice Music Biennale, has been awarded the Louis Spohr Prize 2022. The Louis Spohr Prize is awarded by the Department of Literature and Music of the city of Brunswick, in the German state of Lower Saxony, and the award ceremony will take place today, Sunday, in the Staatstheater (State Theatre) of the city. The jury emphasised that “Lucia Ronchetti is one of the most interesting and committed artistic personalities among contemporary composers. Her music is characterised at the same time by a high level of intellectual reflection, great originality and a concise power of imagination and expression. In her career as a composer, she was driven by a great curiosity and an immense thirst for knowledge, which made her always look beyond predefined limits. This is already evident in her extraordinarily wide-ranging studies in composition, philosophy and musicology, including a doctorate. In her search for new forms of expression, Lucia Ronchetti always looks into the mirror of the past. Her music speaks a very new and innovative language, but is often based on older works, especially baroque, which are repainted, reduced or reinterpreted in compositional terms. Her preoccupation with baroque music, her keen literary judgement and her exploration of the possibilities of the human voice lead her to constantly invent new musical and musical-theatrical forms beyond conventional dramaturgies and styles. In an age that is in danger of losing its cultural memory, Lucia Ronchetti’s commitment to a thoughtful and innovative artistic engagement with our cultural heritage that takes her into the future seems innovative. For this and for her wide-ranging work, she certainly deserves to be honoured with the Louis Spohr Music Prize”.
With the 66th edition of the Venice Music Biennale now over, and before the 67th edition gets underway, Lucia Ronchetti is currently composer-in-residence at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin for the 2022/23 season.
Born in Rome in 1963, Ronchetti studied piano, composition and electronic music at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia and at the Corsi Internazionali in Città di Castello from 1981, and then Humanities at La Sapienza University. He graduated in 1987 with a thesis on the compositions of Bruno Maderna. She obtained a Diploma of Advanced Studies (D.E.A.) and a doctorate in musicology at the Sorbonne in 1999. Lucia Ronchetti currently teaches composition at the Salerno Conservatory of Music.
In addition to the Louis Spohr, Ronchetti has won numerous other awards in her career. In 1995, for example, she received the composition prize “Progetto Dionysos” from the Italian Ministry of Culture. He also received the award for best music at the Arte Non Stop Festival in Buenos Aires in 2020 for the music for the film opera Rivale. Ronchetti’s work ranges from operas and chamber operas to music-theatre experiments without a stage. He has been working at the SWR Experimental Studio in Freiburg since 2003. From 2012 to 2015, she staged a multi-season music theatre project as part of a co-production between the Semperoper Dresden and the Opernhaus Halle.