This year the annual tour of Claudio Abbado’s LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA, with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra as its core, takes the ensemble to Baden-Baden, Paris and London. The programme features Mozart’s "Haffner" Symphony and Bruckner’s Fifth. In London, Mitsuko Uchida appears as soloist in Schumann’s Piano Concerto. Members of the LFO also play a chamber concert at the Southbank Centre and Mahler Chamber Soloists appear in the series LIMELIGHT - Classical Music in a Rock’n’Roll Setting at the 100 Club.

Berlin, 5 October 2011 - The first concert takes place Thursday evening 6 October in Baden-Baden, the second on Saturday, 8 October in Paris. The orchestra performs a programme on this tour that was already received with enthusiastic praise at the LUCERNE FESTIVAL this summer: "Where else does one get to hear such extremely soft, many-layered dynamics in the piano range?" remarked the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on the interpretation of Bruckner's Fifth Symphony. "Where else such a strong but always structured fortissimo (in which the strings are never covered by the brass, and the winds, too, consistently add their colouring)?" And of Mozart's "Haffner" Symphony: "The Minuet, sharp in its focussed articulation, and then the presto Finale: fireworks, to which one can respond with nothing other than 'Ah' and 'Oh'."

In London, a total of four performances are scheduled: the opener on Sunday, 9 October is a chamber concert with works of Richard Strauß (Sextet from Capriccio), Schönberg (Verklärte Nacht) and Brahms (Clarinet Quintet op.115). A total of 16 musicians from the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA play on the programme, including MCO musicians Henja Semmler, Béatrice Muthelet, Josep Puchades Escriba and Raphael Bell, as well as LFO concert master Kolja Blacher, clarinettist Stefan Schilling and the four members of the Leipzig String Quartet.

On Monday, 10 October, Mitsuko Uchida appears as soloist in Schumann’s Piano Concerto in her first ever performance with the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA. On 11 October the Mozart/Bruckner programme has its final performance to close this year’s LFO tour period. Claudio Abbado fulfilled a lifelong dream in 2003 with the founding of this orchestra. Musicians close to the Maestro - members of the great symphony orchestras, soloists or chamber musicians - come together each summer to form a large orchestra. Abbado called on the Mahler Chamber Orchestra to form the core of this unique ensemble. The performances of the LFO have garnered much attention in the classical music world; many of them have been broadcast on television and are now available on DVD - most recently, in January 2011, a recording of Mahler's Ninth Symphony from last summer was released. Previous tours have brought the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA to Rome, Vienna and Madrid as well as to New York, Tokyo and Beijing.

Directly following the performances with the LFO, seven MCO musicians appear as part of the series Limelight - Classical Music in a Rock´n´Roll Setting (Wednesday, 12 October). They perform works of the 20th century (John Adams, Piazzolla, Britten, Pärt) as well as an arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for string trio by Dmitri Sitkovetsky at "The 100 Club" in central London.

Under the name Mahler Chamber Soloists, MCO musicians form themselves on a regular basis into a wide variety of small ensembles. These smaller formats give the musicians the opportunity to express their own artistic ideas and to experiment with repertoire, concert formats and venues. Above all, in chamber music the musicians intensify the basis of their orchestral playing: fine-tuned listening and communicating in a group of alert and independent musical personalities.