It may not attract headlines the way that its visual art and cinema siblings regularly do, but the International Festival of Contemporary Music has been part of the Venice Biennale family of cultural events since 1930. It now takes place every year across a fortnight in early autumn, and the composer Lucia Ronchetti is its current artistic director.
Music theatre features prominently in Ronchetti’s own list of works, and it was no surprise that she made it the theme of this year’s programme. It was an appropriate theme for a festival in Venice too, for if the city was not actually the birthplace of opera, it played a huge part in the early development of the form.
