Born in Milan in 1956, Luca Francesconi studied piano and composition with Azio Corghi at the Milan Conservatory. He continued his studies in Boston and in Rome with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio, to whom he served as assistant from 1981 to 1984 and who he followed to Tanglewood. He won the Gaudeamus International Composition Competition in 1984 and the New Music Composer’s Competition in New York in 1987.

He has written over a hundred pieces, for solo performers, large orchestras, and opera, as well as multimedia compositions. His work is frequently commissioned by major international institutions and radio broadcasting companies. His interest in jazz, stage music, cinema, and television, as well as analog, digital, and computer systems for electronic music all bear witness to the eclecticism of his inspiration. He founded his own studio for electroacoustic research in 1975, and in 1990 founded the AGON Institute, a center for research and computer-assisted music composition, which he directed until 2006.

He was a guest professor at the Rotterdam Conservatory in 1990-1991, and is regularly invited to give masterclasses in Europe, the United States, and Japan. He has taught composition for over twenty-five years in various Italian conservatories. Currently, he is the chair of the composition department of the Musikhögskolan of Malmö, in Sweden.

He collaborates regularly with major musicians and international orchestras, and is also an orchestra conductor. He served as the director of the Venice Biennale International Music Festival for four years, from 2008 to 2012, and as artistic consultant (2011) and then director of the Ultima Festival in Oslo (2012). In 2013, he was composer in residence at the Casa Música in Porto.

He has composed several works for voice and ensemble with electronics, such as Etymo (1994), Etymo II (2005), and Sirènes, which premiered in 2009 at the Festival Agora. He has also written numerous concertos including Kubrick’s Bone for cimbalom and orchestra, which premiered in Belgium in 2007 and Hard Pace, a trumpet concerto that premiered in 2008 as part of the Pollini project in Rome; and several string quartets for the Arditti Quartet, the fourth of which, I voli di Niccolò, premiered in 2005. His pieces for large orchestra include Wanderer (1998-1999), Cobalt, Scarlet (1999-2000); he has also written solo instrumental pieces with and without electronics, including Body Electric for violin and electronics (2006) and Animus III for tuba and electronics (2008).

His catalog also includes numerous radio operas composed for the RAI (Italian radio), as well as stage operas and oratorios. These include Lips, Eyes, Bang (1998), with live video processing; Buffa opera for narrator, with a text by Stefano Benni (2002); Gesualdo Considered as a Murderer, a commission from the Holland Festival, which premiered in 2004. In 2010, the Teatro Ponchielli of Cremona premiered Attraverso, a retelling of Orpheus for soprano and ensemble. For the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy, Francesconi was commissioned to write Terra, an oratorio based on a text by Valeria Parrella, which premiered in September 2011 at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. April 2011 saw the premiere of the opera Quartett, commissioned by and performed at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, conducted by Susanna Mälkki; it was performed again with a smaller cast at the Festival Wiener Festwochen in May 2012. In June 2012,Atopia, an oratorio based on texts by Piero della Francesca and Calderón de la Barca premiered in Madrid. In 2014, Dentro non ha tempo for large orchestra premiered at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Bread, Water and Salt, based on a text by Nelson Mandela, premiered in 2015 in Rome, conducted by Antonio Pappano. Francesconi received a commission from the Opéra National de Paris for the opera Trompe-la-Mort, with a libretto he wrote based on the work of Honoré de Balzac, which premiered in 2017 at the Palais Garnier. In 2017 he also received a commission from the Daniel Barenboim Foundation for Daedalus for flute and ensemble, which premiered at the Boulez Saal in Berlin in January 2018. That same year, Trauma Études for ensemble was commissioned by the United States Library of Congress. It premiered in March 2019.

Luca Francesconi’s work has received many awards and honors, including the Martin Codax Award and the International Guido d’Arezzo Prize in 1985, the Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Prize in 1990, the Ernst-von-Siemens Prize in Munich in 1994, the Prix Italia for Ballata del rovescio del mondo in 1994, the Franco Abbiati Critics Award for the opera Quartett in 2011, a Royal Philharmonic Society of London Music Award for Duende. The Dark Notes in 2015, and the Premio Italiques Prize for Trompe-la-Mort in 2018.