Name: Festival Strings Lucerne | Daniel Dodds | Karl-Heinz Schütz
Start: 2026-09-06T14:30:00
Location: KKL Luzern Concert Hall

Karl-Heinz Schütz

Daniel Dodds

Lucerne Festival

Lucerne Festival Strings

Some concerts you simply do not forget. Such was the case when Víkingur Ólafsson performed Bach’s monumental Goldberg Variations at the 2023 Lucerne Festival. He did so in a way few had ever encountered before: as a vivid drama of the human condition, bringing a multitude of voices and characters to life and spanning the full range of emotions. He subsequently took the work on tour, performing it nearly 100 times around the world. “This piece is very close to me, so I’ve been giving it a bit of a rest because I wanted to have a fresh take on it,” Víkingur recalls. That time away from the Goldbergs gave rise to a bold idea. For the opening of Lucerne Festival Pulse — which he will curate for the next three years — Víkingur will join forces with his compatriot, the celebrated visual artist Olafur Eliasson, to reimagine Bach’s masterpiece as a Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art uniting sound and light projection. The setting for this 90-minute journey through time and space is the St. Pius Church in Meggen, with its delicate walls of translucent marble. Eliasson will respond to Víkingur’s playing in real time with his new, site-specific light installation, making each of the three performances unique. “I don’t really know how it’s going to turn out,” says Víkingur. “But that should be the spirit of the festival, to embrace the unexpected.”

Víkingur Ólafsson | Olafur Eliasson

St. Pius Church

Three piano concertos in a single evening – each one building a bridge to the past. Maurice Ravel composed his Piano Concerto in G “in the spirit of Mozart,” yet it also shimmers with hints of jazz and Basque folk music. In Credo, Arvo Pärt draws on the famous C major Prelude from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, juxtaposing familiar tonality with avant-garde techniques. And György Kurtág – who celebrated his 100th birthday in February 2026 – looks back to the free associations of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Op. 27 piano sonatas in his mesmerizing spatial work … quasi una fantasia …, which positions the instruments all around the audience. These three strikingly different concertos are set alongside America – A Prophecy, a dark, apocalyptic vision by the British composer Thomas Adès, who conducts the performance himself. The work confronts the destruction of Mayan culture by the Spanish conquistadors, with a soprano cast in the role of a warning seer. And at the very start of the concert,  in György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique, 100 metronomes will begin ticking at the same time. One by one, they gradually fall silent. When the last metronome stops, says Víkingur Ólafsson, it feels “like the end of life.”

Mahler Chamber Orchestra | MDR Radio Choir | Thomas Adès | Víkingur Ólafsson | Anna Dennis

KKL Luzern Concert Hall

Could this be what eternity sounds like? A performance of Piano and String Quartet, a late work by the American composer Morton Feldman (1926–87), lasts some 80 minutes — yet in all that time we hear little more than delicate, endlessly resonating piano arpeggios and sustained string chords. This crystalline study in pianissimo seems to have no beginning and no end, no sense of direction — there is only surrender to the present moment of sound. Listening to it is a paradoxical experience: in its radical stillness, Feldman’s slow-motion music exerts a powerful pull. “The first 30 minutes feel a little bit slow because the piece is made of these surreal, beautiful, slow moving — or almost not moving — harmonies,” Víkingur remarks. “It’s just this way of being. The next 30 minutes go by so much faster. And the last 30 minutes, believe it or not, go by in a flash.” He was especially eager to return to this “one-of-a-kind” piece, which he last performed a decade ago. The setting will add to the magic, with the audience seated onstage, close to the five performers.

Danish String Quartet | Víkingur Ólafsson

“Is there a string quartet on this planet that I like more?” Víkingur Ólafsson rhetorically asks. The answer, of course, is no. Formed 25 years ago at the Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen, the Danish String Quartet has achieved cult status, with a shelf full of awards to match. Most recently, the four “Vikings,” as they jokingly call themselves on account of their bearded looks, received the prestigious Léonie Sonning Music Prize. Their hallmarks include electrifying arrangements of Nordic folk music, yet they are equally at home in the classical and contemporary repertoire. Their Festival debut begins, fittingly for Víkingur’s programming vision, with Bach. Stravinsky’s neoclassical Suite italienne, heard here in the quartet’s own arrangement, also draws on Baroque models. But the title of the concert comes from Beethoven, who inscribed the finale of his last string quartet with a question: “Muss es sein?” (“Must it be?”) — and gave his own reply in the lively main section: “It must be!” Just like this concert.

Danish String Quartet

Víkingur Ólafsson believes that Ludwig van Beethoven reinvented himself with the Sonata in E major, Op. 109, while at the same time paying homage to one of his great inspirations: Johann Sebastian Bach, who served as Beethoven’s “compass” for this venture into the unknown, as he puts it. The last movement of Op. 109 is a theme and variations that reveals “striking connections with the Goldberg Variations,” according to Víkingur. “Both are built on a songful Sarabande theme which comes back at the end in a cyclical return — the only time Beethoven does so in a variation movement. Even more, he brings little glimpses from the Goldbergs into play, including direct citations from Bach and such techniques as a fugato and so on.” Víkingur’s recital traces a path to this pinnacle through four works, all in E major or minor yet each strikingly different in character. Alongside a Bach prelude and the great E minor Partita, he includes a rarely heard Schubert sonata comprising only two movements that he believes was written in response to Beethoven’s own two-movement Sonata in E minor, Op. 90 — which is why it, too, merits a place on his program.

Víkingur Ólafsson

Bach — and beyond. For the grand finale of Lucerne Festival Pulse, Víkingur Ólafsson himself takes the stage to perform the composer’s famous F minor Piano Concerto. Following intermission, Hong Kong-born maestra Elim Chan leads the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony — a work that likewise bears Bach’s influence. The finale’s Passacaglia theme, which Brahms transforms with masterly skill, comes from Bach’s earliest surviving cantata, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (“For Thee, O Lord, I Long”), BWV 150. Even in Berg’s Violin Concerto — “one of the most Romantic ever,” as Víkingur calls it — a Bach reference appears in the form of a quote from the chorale Es ist genug (“It Is Enough”). For this performance, he has invited his favorite violinist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, entrusting her with a special role: instead of an encore, she will play the original chorale. The orchestra will sing along, and the audience is invited to join in. “That’s something I’m not sure has ever been done at Lucerne Festival,” Víkingur says. “But the question is, can we really ever have enough of music?” The answer is clear: no — nor of Lucerne Festival Pulse, which will return for its second edition in 2027.

Mahler Chamber Orchestra | Elim Chan | Víkingur Ólafsson | Patricia Kopatchinskaja

A first for the Festival: our new Executive and Artistic Director, Sebastian Nordmann, kicks off the Summer Festival by inviting everyone to a big party – free of charge. The acclaimed horn player Sarah Willis and her Havana Lyceum Orchestra bring samba and salsa rhythms, Cuban traditionals, and lively classical arrangements to the Europaplatz – music that invites the audience to join in and enjoy the moment.

Havana Lyceum Orchestra | José Antonio Méndez Padrón | Sarah Willis

KKL Lucerne

A first for the Festival: our new Executive and Artistic Director, Sebastian Nordmann, kicks off the Summer Festival by inviting everyone to a big party – free of charge. In the Concert Hall of the KKL Luzern, Riccardo Chailly and the fabulous Lucerne Festival Orchestra will set the mood with Gershwin and Bernstein, rumba and mambo – the perfect prelude to an unforgettable Cuban Night. Afterward, you can head over directly to the open-air “Classical Music for All” concert on the Europaplatz.

Lucerne Festival Orchestra | Riccardo Chailly | soloists of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO)

Go West! To open the summer Festival, Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra explore a range of “American Dreams.” First up is George Gershwin, who fused classical music and jazz so brilliantly that the old divide between highbrow and popular music simply falls away. His snappy Cuban Overture, inspired by a visit to Havana, practically dances on rumba rhythms. In contrast, his grand Concerto in F — which Chailly considers “the first American piano concerto” — takes its cues from the Charleston and the blues. Gershwin called its finale “a rhythmic orgy”: the perfect showcase for a boundary-pushing artist like the 34-year-old Frank Dupree, with his overflowing energy and infectious joy in performance.

Lucerne Festival Orchestra | Riccardo Chailly | Frank Dupree | soloists of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO)

For his debut as this summer’s “artiste étoile,” Augustin Hadelich brings along a work from his adopted American homeland that he especially loves: the irresistibly beautiful Violin Concerto by Samuel Barber. He finds Barber’s musical language “highly emotional” and notes that the intensely expressive slow movement can send chills up and down your spine. But the virtuoso in Hadelich is challenged here too — above all in the finale: “It’s like a perpetual-motion machine — you have to let go and still keep everything under control.” 

Lucerne Festival Orchestra | Klaus Mäkelä | Augustin Hadelich

The very first concert of the Lucerne Festival Academy under its new Artistic Director, Jörg Widmann, will be loud, wild, and unrestrained. Anyone who is lulled by the subtitle “Poème dansé” to associate Wolfgang Rihm’s Tutuguri with an elegant ballet score in the style of Debussy may be in for quite a shock. With explosive brass eruptions, ominously pulsing rhythms, blood-curdling screams, and a final drum barrage from six percussionists lasting about a half hour, Tutuguri will shake the very foundations of the KKL Luzern. Rihm was inspired in the early 1980s by a poem by the French avant-garde theater visionary Antonin Artaud, who half a century earlier had witnessed a peyote ritual among the Tarahumara, an Indigenous people in Mexico, and transformed the experience into literature. The imagery evokes black suns and scorched earth, naked riders and headless horses, archaic rites and fevered hallucinations. Rihm aimed for “music in its raw state”: a “‘sonic body’ whose twitching and transformation become melody, rhythm, and color.”

Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) | Jörg Widmann | Michael Engelhardt

For ten years, the Composer Seminar of the Lucerne Festival Academy — founded by Wolfgang Rihm and now led by Dieter Ammann and Unsuk Chin — has been a defining part of the Academy’s work. To mark its anniversary, it is introducing a major change: from now on, participants will apply not with ensemble pieces but with works for orchestra. After all, composing for large forces demands a great deal of experience. Yet which young composer has the chance to work intensively with a professional orchestra? That is precisely what the Composer Seminar offers: six emerging composers from around the world discuss their pieces in individual coaching sessions and two public workshops, rehearse them with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO), and then present them in the Closing Concert on 23 August. In this way, they put their music to the test in a practical way and receive valuable feedback not only from the musicians and conductors but also from the audience.

Participants in the Composer Seminar | Dieter Ammann | Unsuk Chin

The Festival Strings Lucerne and Daniel Dodds are tying together a delightful garland of the loveliest melodies and dances from the New World in keeping with this summer’s theme, “American Dreams.” Though the program begins with a Czech composer — Antonín Dvořák, with the vibrant and feather-light Scherzo from his Serenade for Strings — it fits perfectly, since Dvořák was the “midwife” who helped American music discover its own identity. The African American composer Florence Price carries his musical language forward: her touching Andante cantabile goes straight to the heart. Also on board is the “Bad Boy of Music,” George Antheil, with a cheeky Allegro from his First Serenade. John Corigliano sends us traveling toward a better world filled with pleasure and brightness in his sonorous Voyage, inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s famous poem L’Invitation au voyage. George Gershwin enchants with a gentle lullaby, and Leonard Bernstein invites us to waltz. And how to top all that? With the Hoe-Down from Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo, of course — a square dance in classic country style.