20th anniversary of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra

0000: To mark the jubilee, Accentus Music will be recording three concerts from this year's summer festival.

Lucerne Festival Orchestra was founded exactly 20 years ago by Claudio Abbado and Michael Haefliger, establishing a link with the legendary “elite orchestra” for which Arturo Toscanini assembled acclaimed virtuosos of his time into a magnificent ensemble in 1938, the year of the Festival’s founding. For this year’s edition, maestro Riccardo Chailly chose Mahler’s 3rd , his longest symphony as the opening concert. To this day, it is considered one of the most magnificent and powerful achievements bridging late Romanticism and modernism.

Followed by a concert with Maria João Pires, who is widely regarded as one of the leading interpreters of Mozart and reduced her public performances considerably in the past years, so Mozart’s piano concerto in D minor K. 466 in combination with Brahms’ 4th symphony promises to become a special audiovisual delight for the TV audience.

Las but not least, a matinee looks back to one of the orchestra’s first-ever chamber concerts, which took place on 16 August 2003. They performed Debussy’s late-period Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp; Schoenberg’s late-Romantic string sextet Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”); and Ravel’s Introduction et Allegro, an exquisite chamber concerto for the double-pedal harp with miniature orchestra. This time, Dvořák’s G major String Quintet, opulently scored with a double bass, adds a Czech musical prelude to the mix.

4K/UHD HDR productions by Accentus Music.