Name: Festival Strings Lucerne | Daniel Dodds
Start: 2026-09-03T18:20:00
Location: KKL Luzern

Daniel Dodds

Lucerne Festival Strings

Lucerne Festival

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.

Festival Strings Lucerne | Daniel Dodds | Karl-Heinz Schütz

KKL Luzern Concert Hall

With one hand she snaps a three-beat rhythm, with the other a two-beat rhythm, and on top of that she sings the violin melody: when America’s top violinist Hilary Hahn explains Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto “in a nutshell” on a YouTube video, it becomes instantly clear why she chose this very piece for her long-awaited Lucerne Festival debut. Mischief and joy leap out at you — she loves this concerto, and the spark catches immediately. Hilary Hahn combines lightness with seriousness, virtuosity with poetry. That’s why, many feel, she belongs to a class of her own. Just like the Vienna Philharmonic: the flagship orchestra from the metropolis on the Danube will show everything it can do — passionate drama, delicate nuance, and a melting, luminous sound — when it performs what may be the finest ballet score ever written. Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet recounts Shakespeare’s “most excellent and lamentable tragedy” with flair, wit, and sheer impact. The conductor Tugan Sokhiev has assembled his own selection of the most beautiful numbers. And we love and suffer along with the star-crossed couple, hoping until the last moment — and we may well shed a few tears.

Vienna Philharmonic | Tugan Sokhiev | Hilary Hahn

A nearly hour-long Ninth Symphony with chorus and large orchestra: who wouldn’t think of Beethoven? But, “instead of praising joy, that beautiful spark of the gods” — to quote the Schiller line Beethoven sets in his Ninth — Henze said that in his Sinfonia N. 9 he evokes “a world of horror and persecution that continues to cast its shadow.” The work is based on Anna Seghers’s great anti-fascist novel The Seventh Cross: seven prisoners escape from a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, and only one of them manages to reach freedom. With gripping intensity and deep empathy, Henze traces the fugitives’ terror and the brutality of their pursuers — “an apotheosis of the terrible and the painful,” and at the same time “an expression of the greatest reverence for the people who resisted during the era of Nazi-fascist terror.” With Henze’s harrowing confession in sound, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin and its acclaimed Chief Conductor Joana Mallwitz make their Lucerne Festival debut. And since Joana Mallwitz is not only a thrilling maestra but also a gifted communicator, she will introduce the symphony herself at the start of the concert.

Konzerthausorchester Berlin | Berlin Radio Choir | Joana Mallwitz

Classical music in short form — free of charge and refreshingly casual. Through music and conversation, we’ll introduce you to select artists and works in the early evening: young talents and major stars, beloved classics and adventurous new sounds.

HSLU Ensemble

KKL Luzern

When 18-year-old Yunchan Lim won the 2022 Van Cliburn Competition with Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, conductor Marin Alsop had tears in her eyes. The jury was no less moved by what they had just heard. Here was someone who simply played differently: powerful and tender, mature and electrifying at the same time, as juror Stephen Hough put it. His colleague Jean-Efflam Bavouzet admitted in astonishment: “I was simply speechless.” The young Korean’s career took off like a rocket afterward — despite the fact that he avoids all showmanship and lives solely for the music, like a priest for God. He now makes his Lucerne Festival debut with Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, a work that shifts between Basque folk color and Mozartian elegance. It promises to be an event. The Czech Philharmonic will partner with him and bookend his appearance with two signature works from their homeland. Chief Conductor Semyon Bychkov will open the evening with the quintessential Czech classic, Bedřich Smetana’s world-famous Vltava. And after intermission comes Antonín Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony, arguably his most heroic.

Czech Philharmonic | Semyon Bychkov | Yunchan Lim

When harp lessons were announced at a school assembly, Mared Pugh-Evans’s hand shot up immediately. She later recalled in an interview that she had always been very well-behaved — it was simply in her nature — but that moment may have been the most mischievous thing she had ever done. Little Mared was six at the time, and her father was the headmaster of her primary school. And that headmaster looked pretty stunned on the podium — perhaps mentally calculating the family budget, since a good harp can easily cost many tens of thousands of pounds. In Mared’s case, however, the investment more than paid off: by eleven she was already proving herself in competitions, and she has since earned numerous awards. The crowning moment came in 2024, when King Charles III appointed her “The King’s Harpist” — a royal position that had been reinstated by the then Prince of Wales in 2000. Back then, it went to Catrin Finch, the very harpist whose concert the young Mared had once listened to in rapt fascination, sparking her own love of the instrument. A “full circle” if ever there was one!

Mared Pugh-Evans

Lukaskirche Lucerne

For 25 years, Yuja Wang has dazzled the music world with her stupendous virtuosity, yet routine has never crept in. She is always searching for something new, eager to discover the unfamiliar and reinvent herself. The Festival theme “American Dreams” immediately resonated with her. That’s why she has added Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto to her repertoire: a work that picks up threads from Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff, yet also shows the influence of Bartók and jazz. The result was so striking that Barber received the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1963. The real fun starts in the second half, when Yuja Wang performs the Jazz Suite by the Ukrainian composer Alexander Tsfasman — taking on the musical direction herself. She has a true feeling for jazz and, not coincidentally, received the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo for her album The American Project. Her longtime friend Teddy Abrams was on the podium for that recording. In Lucerne, he will conduct the first half of the concert, beginning with Aaron Copland’s refreshing Appalachian Spring, with its echoes of folk songs, hymns, square dances, and fiddle music. America at its best!

Mahler Chamber Orchestra | Yuja Wang | Teddy Abrams

Forget everything you think you know about Wagner! Kent Nagano, the Dresden Festival Orchestra, and Concerto Köln are setting new standards with their performance of the Ring cycle. For the first time ever, this monumental project is being heard in a historically informed interpretation. Just as in Wagner’s own day, the string players use gut strings; the wind instruments are reconstructed based on 19th-century models; the orchestra’s tuning is lower; and the text is at times declaimed rather than traditionally “sung.” Suddenly everything becomes intelligible — and at times it almost recalls the delivery of art song. Working with an international research team, Nagano has brought surprising insights to light. The result is striking. “Light and airy” is how Jan Brachmann described this Wagner in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; in particular, the winds impress “with sharper definition in their individual colors: they creak, belch, and grunt with a kind of unruly physicality.” With Götterdämmerung, the Ring comes full circle this summer. And once more we have the chance to experience Wagner’s music as he himself most likely heard it.

Dresden Festival Orchestra | Concerto Köln | Dresden Festival Choir of the Richard Wagner Academy | Kent Nagano | Soloists

Creating something new, bringing something into being that did not exist before: that is the meaning of the ancient Greek verb poiein. Sarah Ying Ma thought it a fitting name when she and her fellow Oberlin Conservatory students Max Ball, Jasper de Boor, and Drew Dansby founded a string quartet in Ohio in 2022. And the four of them hit the ground running: after just one year, the Poiesis Quartet — which collectively identifies as queer — shot straight to first prize at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. Fun fact: their final round of rehearsals was propelled by a special sense of urgency, as they had accidentally prepared according to the previous year’s repertoire guidelines. More awards followed, most recently first prize at the renowned Banff International String Quartet Competition, which also comes with their debut at Lucerne Festival. The “American Dream” of this American quartet? Giving a platform to composers who do not belong to the traditional canon. They will fully embrace that artistic freedom in Lucerne as well: with Pisachi by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, a member of the Chickasaw Nation, and a quartet by the Black composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, who fused classical, jazz, and pop idioms in his music.

Poiesis Quartet

The world held its breath in 2021 when the then–22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman, wearing a canary-yellow coat, recited her poem The Hill We Climb at the inauguration of U.S. President Joe Biden. Her delivery felt like a blend of performance and sermon as Gorman sketched her own “American Dream”: “We will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.” She struck a nerve, responding to contemporary anxieties while offering hope. On 11 September 2026, the 25th anniversary of the devastating terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, Amanda Gorman will appear at Lucerne Festival. Together with cellist Jan Vogler, she will shape an evening of poetry and music. Gorman’s visionary verses meet Johann Sebastian Bach’s incomparable suites for solo cello — a bridge across 300 years. She recites between the movements, and at times even speaks directly into the music. The result is a dialogue that, as Vogler emphasizes, strengthens our faith in humanity and offers many surprising insights.

Amanda Gorman | Jan Vogler

A techno marching band? What on earth is that? Easy: it’s spectacular! Playing exclusively on acoustic instruments — completely analog — MEUTE delivers hypnotically driving techno and house with hefty brass sound and propulsive beats. The eleven musicians in their bright red jackets cover celebrated club hits, perform their own tracks, and turn drums and trumpets, saxophone and sousaphone, trombone and marimba into a high-energy stage show. What began in 2015 as an experiment on the streets of Hamburg’s St. Pauli neighborhood quickly grew into an internationally acclaimed phenomenon: several viral hits, worldwide tours, four albums to date, and appearances in the series Babylon Berlin. Just before the Festival draws to a close, MEUTE comes to Lucerne for the first time — and will transform the KKL into a dance floor as the bass thunders, the gold buttons and braids of their marching-band uniforms sparkle in the strobe lights, and everyone — absolutely everyone — is dancing.

MEUTE – Techno Marching Band

Thomas Ospital opens his organ recital with the American national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner. But what composer Dudley Buck does with it will take your breath away — there’s nothing remotely patriotic or martial about it. And that’s not the only sly twist. The fact that Ospital — a Frenchman born in Bayonne in 1990 and, since 2015, titular organist of Saint-Eustache in Paris — should become the “Voice of America” is enough to make you smile. Just as amusing is the observation that America, an earlier, unofficial U.S. national anthem varied by Charles Ives, is actually based on an English tune. But Ospital doesn’t stop at clever punchlines. He will also play a brilliant transcription of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead as well as the Symphonie-Passion by the French organ master Marcel Dupré, who was inspired by the largest organ in the world, the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ in Philadelphia. The rousing “closer” is Iain Farrington’s Live Wire — a piece that sounds as if it were being played by a jazz band.