Tonight in Lucerne, the festival year will be launched with a three-day Mendelssohn Festival — which is also the first in a new spring residency for the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and Riccardo Chailly that will complement their customary Summer Festival performances.
This mini-Spring Festival will explore Mendelssohn in conjunction with his leading contemporaries, including, for the opening tonight, with his chief antagonist, Richard Wagner.
Anne-Sophie Mutter and friends will also join with musicians from the Lucerne Festival Orchestra for a special benefit concert for Ukraine on Saturday, performing chamber music by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Shostakovich.
This weekend, Lucerne Festival will launch the first edition of its Forward Festival devoted to contemporary music. Members of the international Lucerne Festival Academy network have spearheaded this new fall initiative, which has been curated by a team of 18 members. The organizing theme is “networks” and the process of forging connections and achieving closer communication with the audience.
The opening event pays tribute to the late Louis Andriessen Friday evening, 19 November, at 10:00 pm CET, with a raucous performance of Workers Union (video intro here).
Winnie Huang will create 10-minute performances for just one guest at a time throughout the festivaland Annea Lockwood’s Water and Memory and Michael Pisaro’s ricefall will similarly engage listeners. In, ricefall, for example, the participants let grains of rice trickle like rain onto various objects and surfaces, enabling an immersive and meditative sound experience. Olga Neuwirth was inspired by Ray Bradbury’s science fiction story “The Long Rain” to create her work of spatial music Construction in space: The sound is in motion, with the audience located right in the middle. Pauline Oliveros’ Out of the Dark, performed in complete darkness, is also conceived as spatial music and, like Lockwood, aims at “deep listening”: the listeners immerse themselves in the time-space continuum of the sound and become part of it.
A new piece by the Swiss percussionist and composer Jessie Cox will also be premiered — one of six works commissioned by the curatorial team to explore and exploit the architecture and acoustics unique to the KKL Concert Hall. “Networks” are additionally at the center of the various models of musical self-organization which Luis Fernando Amaya’s Tinta Roja, Tinta Negra, José-Luis Hurtado’s Retour, and George Lewis’s Artificial Life 2007 explore in open scores that work with improvisational elements.
Bernard Haitink has died. The 92-year-old conductor passed away peacefully at home, according to his representatives.
I had the privilege of attending his very final concert, in the summer of 2019, when he led the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra at Lucerne Festival. He maintained a close association with Lucerne for many years, including a nearby residence. Haitink’s farewell song was Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 (without score), paired with Beethoven’s G major Piano Concerto, with Emanuel Ax as the soloist.
Christian Wildhagen penned an eloquent review: ““Hatte er zuvor bei Beethovens 4. Klavierkonzert vorrangig Emmanuel Ax, einem feinsinnigen Pianisten der alten Schule, in nobel-zurückhaltender Weise die Bühne bereitet, so kam bei Bruckner noch einmal der grosse Architekt, der überragende Formgestalter Haitink zur Geltung. Wie beim späten Günter Wand wird die Detailarbeit hier mitnichten zur Nebensache, sie bildet aber lediglich die Basis für eine viel weiter ausgreifende Gestaltung, in der Entwicklungen teilweise über drei, vier Minuten behutsam entfaltet werden (etwa in der magischen Rückführung zur Reprise im ersten Satz oder beim grossen Wagner-Epitaph im Adagio), während sich die Spannungsbögen sogar bruchlos über ganze Sätze wölben.”
That summer–the last before the pandemic–there was also a vernissage for the publication of Erich Singer and Peter Hagmann’s fine collection of essays and conversations with Haitink: Dirigieren ist ein Rätsel. An English translation has yet to be issued.
The British-born, Berlin-residing Rebecca Saunders is this summer’s composer-in-residence at Lucerne Festival. Tonight brings the culminating event of her residency: the world premiere of her piano concerto to an utterance. She wrote it while working closely with the soloist Nicholas Hodges, in her signature fashion, to explore aspects of the instrument’s sound potential.
The premiere was originally to have taken place last summer and had to be postponed because of the pandemic. In another twist, Ivan Volkov, who was originally scheduled to conduct, had to bow out just last week for reasons of health. Composer-conductor Enno Poppe will lead the newly named Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. They will then take the work to Musicfest Berlin.
“The solo piano within this concerto was conceived as a disembodied voice,” explains Saunders. “It seeks to tell its own story, wavering, almost painfully, inevitably failing to sustain its uncertain striving. It seeks to attain the silence of its end through its own excessive speaking: an incessant, compulsive soliloquy on the precipice of non-being.”
The clip above is from a piece titled “Study,” based on the solo part, that Saunders presented last year at the Musikfest Berlin.
toan utterance is the tenth in the series of Roche Commissions sponsored by the pharmaceutical giant Roche. The latest composer to be commissioned has also been announced: Thomas Adés, who will write a violin concerto for Anne-Sophie Mutter to be unveiled in the summer of 2022.
This evening in Lucerne (at 6.30 pm local time), the 2021 Summer Festival begins with Riccardo Chailly leading the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in a program of Mozart and Schubert. The concert is being streamed on arte.
The summer’s theme, quite aptly for these times, is “Crazy” — the German word verrückt having especially rich connotations that extend from mental imbalance to the dislocations and ruptures that seed a paradigm shift.
Lucerne Festival today presented its new plans for an expanded season and also introduced the programming for the 2021 Summer Festival. The theme is inspired by the “crazy” times we’ve been living through. In German, the usual for crazy (verrückt) also carries the connotation of “dislocation” — as in a revolutionary artist shifting and upending conventional paradigms.
Another round of bad news begins. While musical life with restrictions was continuing this fall in Europe, the coronavirus pandemic is far from over and is now causing a new round of cancellations. Today Lucerne Festival announced that it has been forced to cancel the “Beethoven Farewell” Fall Festival originally planned for late November.
From the press release:
We had been so looking forward to celebrating our “Beethoven Farewell” with you at the end of November and thus to concluding the difficult year 2020 in a spirit full of hope.
But the coronavirus pandemic has caught up with us again, and the second wave is frustrating our wonderful plans. After the latest decisions by the Swiss Federal Council, which were taken on 28 October 2020, it is unfortunately no longer possible to hold this Fall Festival. Therefore, with a heavy heart we must inform you that the five concerts we had planned cannot take place.
We are in close contact with Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Igor Levit, the two protagonists of “Farewell Beethoven,” and are already discussing how we might reschedule these projects and make up for lost time. We will keep you informed about all further developments – and hopefully come back to you soon with better news.
Time for live performances to begin again in Lucerne. On Friday Lucerne Festival launches “Life Is Live”, a ten-day-long series of events that invite audiences back into the KKL Concert Hall and other venues.
The Opening Concert also marks a belated debut for the 93-year-old Herbert Blomstedt, who will conduct the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA for the very first time.
Here’s a list of ways to hear programs being broadcast via livestreams and radio. For example, the Opening Concert (with Martha Argerich as the soloist in Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto) will be transmitted with a short time-delay, starting at 2pm EST on 14 August on SRF2.
Other notable events: two all-Beethoven recitals with Igor Levit, an all-Schumann recital by the young tenor Mauro Peter, a recital by the saxophonist Valentine Michaud, and Cecilia Bartoli and friends in the Handel-inspired program “What Passion Cannot Music Raise”.
One sign of hope at least in the music world with regard to live performance: Lucerne Festival, after having to cancel its meticulously planned Summer Festival, has announced a short festival of 10 days that will take its place. Unlike the United States, Switzerland has a functioning government that has actually taken the coronavirus pandemic seriously and is thus in a position to start carefully relaxing restrictions on audience gatherings.
Titled Life Is Live, the short festival includes Martha Argerich and Herbert Blomstedt with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in the opening concerts, as well as a pair of recitals by Igor Levit, who continues his complete Beethoven sonata cycle.
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