The summer festival celebrates 20 years of the Lucerne Festival Academy and has the motto "Curiosity". Lisa Batiashvili and Sheku Kanneh-Mason are "artistes étoiles", Lisa Streich and Beat Furrer are composers-in-residence.
Before the summer festival really gets going, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven will be the focus of the spring festival (March 22-24). Riccardo Chailly and Pablo Heras-Casado will conduct the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.
For this year's Piano Festival (May 9 to 12), Igor Levit has invited the Berlin Baroque Soloists, Lukas Sternath, Johanna Summer and the rapper and songwriter Danger Dan.
New works and ways of presenting them:
With the summer motto "Curiosity", Lucerne Festival literally means "greed for the new". It is the 20th anniversary of the Lucerne Festival Academy. Every summer, around 100 young instrumentalists, conductors and composers explore the new in contemporary music.
The Swedish composer Lisa Streich and the Swiss-Austrian composer Beat Furrer are present as composers-in-residence. The Georgian-German violinist Lisa Batiashvili and the British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason demonstrate their versatile skills as "artistes étoiles" in various concert formats. Chief conductor Riccardo Chailly conducts two evenings with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra: Mahler's Seventh Symphony in the opening concert and a Rachmaninov program. Guest conductors Yannick Nézet-Séguin and, for the first time, Klaus Mäkelä will lead the Lucerne Festival Orchestra on two further evenings. The closing concert on September 15 will be performed by the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra under Alan Gilbert with Arnold Schoenberg's monumental "Gurre-Lieder".
Klaus Mäkelä © Mathias Benuigui/Pasco & Co.
In its anniversary year, the Lucerne Festival Academy welcomes the young conductor and former Academy member Ruth Reinhardt as well as Sir George Benjamin and Beat Furrer, whose 70th birthday is being celebrated. Works by Academy founder Pierre Boulez and Artistic Director Wolfgang Rihm will be performed, and the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) will play music by this summer's composers-in-residence: the world premiere of an orchestral work by Beat Furrer as part of the "Roche Commissions", and a concerto for trumpet and orchestra by Lisa Streich.
This summer, audiences can once again look forward to the stars of the industry and the most renowned international orchestras and conductors: The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra with Kirill Petrenko, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra with Myung-Whun Chung and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with Christian Thielemann are among those taking part.
August 13 to September 15, 2024
