Early years

At the age of five, won over by a concert by Svjatoslav Richter, he began to learn the piano. Ever since he has developed his musical research in the most personal way. He enrolled in the Conservatory of Milan only later, in 1974, while he was still attending the Classical Languages High School.

Meanwhile, he explored the length and breadth of the musical landscape, playing in jazz and rock groups as well as in classical concerts, working as a session man in recording studios, composing music for theatre, cinema, commercials, radio and television.

He soon realised that a truly living language, while looking at the present, draws its lifeblood from its roots. The Milan Conservatory was opening more and more space to contemporary music so Francesconi enrolled in the composition course conducted by Azio Corghi.

In 1981 he studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and he started a four years collaboration with Luciano Berio.

Luciano Berio was a supreme musician:
everything he touched became music.

With Berio, Francesconi studied in the field, acting as his assistant until 1984. Among the projects, he worked at La vera storia  (premiered in La Scala in 1982). In 1984 he was part  of the experimental transcription of the Monteverdi’s Orfeo. He also attended one of his famous summer courses at Tanglewood.

“In the mid-1980s, Francesconi intuited with clarity the necessity to redefine the parameters of the musical language developed by composers from the previous generation. The problem wasn’t repudiating research in the most uncompromising and radical trends in post-World War II music, but to overcome the involution of that language comprised of repetitive, academic formulas, and look to the new scenarios that were opening around the world, driven by social and cultural transformations inevitably linked to developments in the arts.”
Enzo Restagno