August is the time when most orchestra musicians go on vacation or return home. But the MCO does things differently: during this lazy summer month, the musicians pack their suitcases and leave their homes for the Lucerne Festival. They spend around three weeks in Lucerne, often with their families and their hiking boots in tow. The hours in which they can explore central Switzerland are few, but this is a small price to pay for the inspiring and intense days spent in this unique festival atmosphere.
Since 2003, when Claudio Abbado declared it the heart of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra (which he had brought back into existence), the MCO has been an integral part of summer in Lucerne. The Lucerne Festival is one of the most exclusive and highly regarded festivals in the world. For 70 years, it has been inviting the best-known conductors, soloists and orchestras to its idyllic home on Lake Lucerne, where it aims to celebrate music and also to grant artists and audiences a space wholly devoted to art.
Each summer, the Lucerne Festival presents around one hundred symphonic, choral and chamber concerts, as well as film screenings and interviews with artists, all organized around a central theme. This focus on content allows the festival and the MCO to develop ambitious programmes together; these programmes regularly feature world premieres, concert versions of operas, and, since 2009, large-scale oratorios. The festival, which is primarily funded through third-party funds and ticket sales, shares with the orchestra a commitment to presenting programmes which showcase musical diversity and lasting quality; thus it has become one of the MCO’s most important partners, along with the residences in Ferrara and in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The MCO’s programme for summer 2010 is a testament to these values. The theme is »Eros«; the orchestra will present musical stories of happy and unhappy, requited and unrequited, tragic and heroic love. The festival will open with Fidelio, Beethoven’s homage to marital love and constancy, conducted by Claudio Abbado. The cast of singers could hardly be more exclusive: Jonas Kaufmann and Nina Stemme will sing the title roles, and they will be joined by Christoph Fischesser, Peter Mattei, Rachel Harnisch, Christoph Strehl and Falk Struckmann. A recording of this concert version of the opera is also being planned.
The first MCO symphonic concert unites the music of Richard Wagner, Ernest Chausson, Gabriel Fauré and Maurice Ravel. Fauré and Chausson were great admirers of the Bayreuth master; this influence is most audible in Chausson’s work. At the same time, their compositions display an allegiance to French Impressionism and, with that, to Ravel. Many of the works featured on the programme tell of unhappy love and unrequited desire, such as Wagner’s Wesendonck-Lieder and Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande. In contrast, Ravel’s settings of traditional folk tales in Ma mère l’oye lend the programme a sense of hope, which is perhaps most poignantly symbolised by the story of Sleeping Beauty. Matthias Pintscher, who will conduct the concert, is already a friend of the MCO: they last appeared together in 2006, also in Lucerne, when the orchestra premiered Pintscher’s Transir for flute and chamber orchestra.
In summer 2009, the MCO played Schumann’s infrequently-performed oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri under the baton of Daniel Harding. This summer continues in this line with Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Scored for a large orchestra and choir, this oratorio is eminently suited for performance at festivals: 271 singers and 125 orchestral musicians were brought from London to Birmingham in a special train for its premiere in 1846. The Lucerne Festival will feature a star cast: Daniel Harding on the podium, Thomas Quasthoff in the title role (see the Interview), and Julia Kleiter, Bernarda Fink and Michael Schade. From Lucerne, the production will travel to the Musikfest Bremen and finally to Stockholm for the Baltic Sea Festival.
For independently financed orchestras such as the MCO, close connections to musically and structurally innovative promoters like the Lucerne Festival are an essential aid to realizing artistic goals. In an environment in which cultural policy is increasingly focused on profitability, which in turn forces agencies to present low-quality but supposedly cost-effective programmes, true dedication to excellence like that shown by the Lucerne Festival is a much-needed reminder of the real purpose of artistic activity. »We understand art to be a liberal and liberating principle« is the Festival’s mission statement. To that, the MCO could well add: »Conversely, we see freedom as a principle of our art.«
