The Lucerne Festival need not concern itself with modern and contemporary music. Its great cavalcade of the world's greatest orchestras and conductors has been going on on the shores of Lake Lucerne in Central Switzerland at the base of all of those Alps pretty much since Arturo Toscanini decamped here in 1938 after first Germany and the Austria had become inhospitable to freedom, to artistic freedom, and to civilization itself. Since the inauguration of the Concert Hall of the KKL (Concert and Congress Center Lucerne) -- a thing of real physical beauty thanks to French starchitect Jean Nouvel and of the finest acoustical splendor thanks to the late American hall and theatre designer Russell Johnson -- in 1998 its reign as the world's top orchestra festival is undisputed.
The Festival's intendant, Michael Haefliger, took up the managerial reigns here just a few months after the Concert Hall opened and the combination of his coming from a distinguished musical family, his own senses of curiosity, intellectual rigor, and a sort of trans-Atlantic can-do attitude (he has a violin degree for Juilliard and has done advanced business studies in Switzerland and at Harvard) has meant that the music of our own time -- and the musicians who perform it -- are very much central parts of the Festival today.
Add on to this an almost burning commitment to musical education at a very high level and you can see why one of Haefliger's proudest achievements -- and this from a man who created theLucerne Festival Orchestra for Claudio Abbado -- is the Lucerne Festival Academy, a training program in 20th and 21st century music for young professional and graduate student musicians conceived by Haefliger and Pierre Boulez and led by Boulez himself in a non-stop series of 13-hour days over a three week period.
I have followed the Academy program since its launch in 2004 but this is the first year I have been able to attend since it expanded from solo, chamber, and chamber orchestra work to a full-scale-plus orchestral program with enough participants to present major works of Debussy, Boulez himself, and Luciano Berio as well as smaller-scale but equally challenging works by younger generations of currently active composers. More on the Academy and its astonishing back-to-back two performances Saturday night of Boulez's pioneering "Live-Electronic" work Répons to come. Herewith some notes on what else has been on the program.
This year's Festival has two composers-in-residence whose work goes well beyond that of the Academy -- Kaija Saariaho, by now a well-known figure in the U.S. and the 36-year-old Bavarian Jörg Widmann who should be. There are also two featured artists, or "artistes étoiles" in the Festival's nomenclature, Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena and Tashkent-born pianist Yefim Bronfman. When I arrived here on Saturday (after a flight from Chicago to Frankfurt, another from Frankfurt to Zurich, and a train ride from Zurich) I barely had time to set down my bags before I was off to hear the collaboration of two of these distinguished guests -- a joint recital by Widmann, a virtusos clarinetist as well as composer, and Bronfman in the mid-20th century Lucaskirche (St. Luke's Church). Widmann and Bronfman framed their program with two pillars of the Romantic world and the clarinet repertoire, Brahms's 1894 E-Flat Major sonata, Op. 120, No. 2 and Schumann's Fantasiestücke, Op. 73 from 1849. In between came Alban Berg's Four Pieces, Op. 5 (1913) with the two players and then two solo works by Widmann, one a Fantasy for solo clarinet written when he was still a teenager and the other a new work for piano, Eleven Humoresques (a nice nod, perhaps even a bow, to Schumann) written for Bronfman who gave its world première a year ago at New York's Carnegie Hall. As if that were not enough, a world première by Heinz Holliger was added -- a memorial solo piece written last year following the death of Swiss clarinetist Thomas Friedli in a hiking accident in Madeira, of all places, aged 61, given the wistful title Rechant by its composer.
As silly as it might sound to say of a chamber concert at an orchestra festival that if I heard only this afternoon program while here I would have had nothing to complain about. The seamless connections between Widmann the player and Widmann the composer, the sense of adventure he brings to both enterprises, and the total lack of arrogance he displays in them as well are sights to behold and provocative and pleasing sounds to hear. Bronfman of course is the consummate partner and this pairing in the Berg made for perhaps the most luxuriously cast nine minutes in the Modernist canon.
And then there was an all-Mendelssohn concert at the KKL with Philippe Herreweghe leading his Orchestre des Champs-Elysées and two of his famous choirs and then the aforementioned double dose of Répons, the first time in the works 25-year history that Boulez had led it with players and soloists other than those in the Ensemble InterContemporain, the group it was written for and, in essence, with. And the next morning (!) that superb Brit Jonathan Nott leading this year's edition of Europe's Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra in works of Ligeti, Richard Strauss, and Wagner's Wesendonk-Lieder in the wonderful orchestration by Hans Werner Henze with that baritone singer of singers Matthias Goerne.
It's all too much to describe in one sitting, isn't it. I shall go out and breathe some of the famously fresh air off of the splendid lake, and be back with you soon!
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