Lucia Ronchetti: Chronicles of Loneliness

It seems rather an ironic device to attempt to portray the state of loneliness with an entire ensemble of choruses and more than 100 performers, and then to write for an all-male cast. The Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti’s main goal is to devise the complex, profoundly layered soundscapes that are typical for her oeuvre, with minimalistic shifts and variations, melodic turbulences continuously revolving around themselves, like torturous thoughts. Stylistically, her references reach back to the baroque era, while considering increasing loneliness mainly as a symptom of our current times. She found the textual basis for her large-scale choral opera in the notebooks of Giacomo Leopardi, a brilliant Italian intellectual in early 19th-century Italy, who, by his own admission, spent his life »locked into his home without seeing anyone«, due to his »mad urge to learn, full of desperation«, thereby attaining a universal education, but only posthumous fame – now also in the concert hall.

Concert performance in Italian, with German surtitles

Gefördert durch das Kuratorium KölnMusik e.V. und das Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft des Landes NRW

Das Konzert wird für einen Stream auf philharmonie.tv am 17. Mai 20:00 aufgezeichnet. Der Stream wird unterstützt von JTI. 

Das Konzert wird vom WDR für den Hörfunk aufgezeichnet und kann am 11. Mai im Radio und anschließend für 30 Tage auf wdr3.de nachgehört werden.