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.”

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

KKL Luzern Concert Hall

“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

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

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. 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)

Lucerne Festival

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

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

A rare meeting of two legends: Daniel Barenboim and Yo-Yo Ma have shaped musical history over the past half-century. But there is more that binds them. Both regard music as the most powerful path to mutual understanding and have long been committed to intercultural dialogue. With his Silk Road Project, Yo-Yo Ma built a bridge from Asia to the West and continues to transcend boundaries between genres and cultures in his latest projects in order to foster social cohesion. Since 1999 Barenboim has kept the vision of reconciliation alive through the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up largely of Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab musicians — a vision that resonates all the more in our conflict-ridden time.

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra | Daniel Barenboim | Yo-Yo Ma

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 acclaimed Rachmaninoff cycle that Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra have been developing since 2019 comes to its culmination this evening. Chailly’s vision has been not only to present the celebrated warhorses — the Second and Third Piano Concertos and the Second Symphony — but also to champion rarely heard treasures. One such rarity is the early opera Aleko, which Rachmaninoff wrote as a 19-year-old student. 

Lucerne Festival Orchestra | Riccardo Chailly | Lukas Sternath

This ensemble is a true cult favorite. When the brass players of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra gather around trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich and trombonist Jörgen van Rijen to form a brass band, the atmosphere reaches fever pitch in no time at all. All the more so at this summer’s appearance, which is devoted to the theme of “American Dreams.” Gershwin's Strike Up the Band injects an irresistible jolt of swing and high spirits.

Lucerne Festival Orchestra 4 Soloists and Brass Ensemble of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra

The pianist Simon Bürki, who was born in St. Gallen, was just 11 years old when he won three prizes at the International Competition for Young Pianists in Memory of Vladimir Horowitz in 2011. They were far from his last: by now he has collected more than 20 awards, including the Franz Liszt Competition in Weimar and the “Step to Mastery” Competition in St. Petersburg. Yet Bürki resisted the lure of a Wunderkind career and pursued his studies with steady determination — first in Kyiv and Moscow and then in the United States with Sergei Babayan, who also trained Daniil Trifonov. In 2023, Bürki released his debut CD, Reminiscence, a collection of Romantic miniatures from Schumann to Rachmaninoff.

Simon Bürki

Reformierte Lukaskirche

What does America sound like? Perhaps like Rhapsody in Blue, George Gershwin’s early stroke of genius. Just listen to the opening clarinet solo with its long, swooping glissando and you immediately picture the Statue of Liberty, Manhattan, Broadway, or a smoky New York jazz club. Born in 2001, Alexander Malofeev – Russian by birth and now based in Berlin — will perform this “greatest hit” with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra.

Lucerne Symphony Orchestra | Michael Sanderling | Alexander Malofeev

Béla Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin captures the raw, gritty pulse of the modern metropolis. The action unfolds in a seedy den where a young woman lures passersby inside. But instead of finding the pleasure they came for, they are quickly overpowered and robbed by her accomplices — until a mysterious stranger, the Mandarin, falls into the trap . . . The world premiere in 1926 caused such an uproar in Catholic Cologne that the mayor — none other than the future German chancellor Konrad Adenauer — banned the work outright. Bartók then prepared a concert version, though he was never happy with it. “This work is a pantomime with music; both elements should be performed together,” he wrote in the score.

Budapest Festival Orchestra | Eva Duda Dance Company | Iván Fischer | Elisabeth Leonskaja

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.

Lucerne Festival Orchestra | Jakub Hrůša

Mark Andre admits that his “obsession” lies in “compositional in-between spaces” — those moments that vanish almost instantly yet may carry the greatest intensity. In his orchestral work Im Entschwinden (“In Vanishing”), composed in 2021-22, this year’s composer-in-residence focuses on the fleeting instant when sound dissolves into silence. His exquisitely delicate music — splintered into noise-like textures — observes “the very last, most fragile, tender, and unstable signatures of sound,” he notes. For the devout Andre, the title also has a theological dimension, alluding to the risen Christ who slips away from the earthly realm. 

Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) | Baldur Brönnimann | Miah Persson

Normally the roles are clear: the orchestra sits onstage, and the audience listens from the hall. That’s where the sound blends best, of course. But it raises an intriguing question: how does the orchestra itself experience a concert, and what does the conductor actually hear? “Mittendrin” gives you the answer. You take your seat right among the musicians, who are spread out a bit more widely than usual so that extra chairs can be positioned to accommodate you as guests. Iván Fischer, a master of imaginative ideas, invented this wonderfully offbeat format at the Konzerthaus Berlin and now brings it to Lucerne. He conducts a suite from Sergei Prokofiev’s enchanting ballet Cinderella, and you watch him from just a few feet away, as if you were part of the orchestra. “What you experience is simply fantastic,” Fischer says. “You notice countless new details — you hear some instruments right up close, others from farther away. And you feel the players right beside you. The balance isn’t as refined as it is in the hall, but the intensity is incomparable! You’ll never forget it.”

Budapest Festival Orchestra | Iván Fischer

Not quite as famous as the film Jaws but every bit as legendary: The Yellow Shark, Frank Zappa’s final album. In 1992, shortly before his far-too-early death and already visibly weakened by cancer, the American avant-garde rock maverick joined forces with the new music specialists from the Ensemble Modern. For them he wrote a virtuosic orchestral suite that blends newly created pieces with Zappa favorites like Uncle Meat and G-Spot Tornado. That last work — a whirlwind celebration of the vaginal orgasm — was originally composed for the electronic Synclavier and long thought to be unplayable.

Ensemble of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) | Participants in the Contemporary-Conducting Program

The Lucerne Festival Orchestra appears in truly massive forces for this concert: Richard Strauss’s magnificently colorful An Alpine Symphony calls for 64 strings, quadruple woodwinds, eight horns onstage — and twelve more offstage — plus four trumpets and four trombones, two tubas, two harps, organ, celesta, and an enormous battery of percussion. 

Lucerne Festival Orchestra | Jakub Hrůša | Ray Chen

How time flies! Anne-Sophie Mutter was just 13 when she made her Lucerne Festival debut on 23 August 1976. At St. Charles Hall in Meggen, she performed works by Tartini, Bach, de Falla, Paganini, and de Sarasate — accompanied by her brother Christoph at the piano. Her debut was so sensational that she became the talk of the town for days. Word even reached the great Herbert von Karajan. He invited her to play for him, was instantly captivated, and invited the young Anne-Sophie to perform with the Berliner Philharmoniker. So it was in Lucerne that her international career began — and she has remained loyal to Lucerne ever since, giving 50 concerts over the course of 50 years. She has even been serving on the Festival’s Board of Trustees in recent years. On the exact day of her golden anniversary — and on the historic site where it all began — Anne-Sophie Mutter, in conversation with Executive and Artistic Director Sebastian Nordmann, looks back on a half-century during which she has made musical history. But there is more on the agenda: the future of classical music and of the Festival, and her commitment to fostering exceptional young talent. The double bassist Roman Patkoló, whom Anne-Sophie Mutter formerly supported through her foundation, will provide the musical framing.

Marking her 50th anniversary on the Lucerne stage

St. Charles Hall Meggen

It’s the dream held by every singer: to be able to use their voice with such beauty and emotional power that even wild animals begin to purr, the Furies hum contentedly, and stones themselves seem to soften and weep. Such was the legendary gift of Orpheus, the mythical hero whose voice could enchant anyone — even the terrifying demons of the Underworld. No wonder his tale became one of opera’s most beloved subjects: the oldest surviving music drama, from 1600, is based on this ancient myth. But the most famous Orpheus opera of all is Christoph Willibald Gluck’s. 

Les Musiciens du Prince – Monaco | Vocal ensemble Il canto di Orfeo | Cecilia Bartoli

What motivates and inspires young composers today? What concerns them artistically, socially, and politically? And how do they respond to it in sound? You’ll discover the answers at the Composer Seminar’s final concert. It gives a platform to six emerging composers from Brazil and Belgium, China and South Korea, Turkey and the United States. Selected from more than 100 applicants, they first discussed their new orchestral works in plenary sessions and in individual coaching with Dieter Ammann and Unsuk Chin, the Seminar’s two directors.

Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) | Participants in the Contemporary-Conducting Program | Dieter Ammann | Unsuk Chin

For his recital, our “artiste étoile” Augustin Hadelich has planned something special: he will appear with Seong-Jin Cho, South Korea’s superstar pianist, for the very first time — world-class meets world-class. The program could hardly be lovelier: the delicate, deeply romantic Violin Romance by the American composer Amy Beach; Leoš Janáček’s earthy, passionate Sonata with its wild dance rhythms that tear apart any sense of regular meter; and Sergei Prokofiev’s weightless D major Sonata, written in the midst of World War II yet sounding anything but apocalyptic. The evening opens with Johannes Brahms and his melody-rich G major Sonata, which contains a famous song quotation. Hadelich says he came to understand this composer anew after immersing himself in his chamber music, and in general he considers making music in small ensembles the best training for performing with orchestra and, more broadly, for engaging with people. As he puts it, this is how you learn to listen, to respond, to enter into dialogue. A school for life.

Augustin Hadelich | Seong-Jin Cho

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.


Lucerne Festival Orchestra | Anne-Sophie Mutter

Is that a hot-air balloon that has landed here? For two days, an unusual yellow object stands in Lucerne, serving as both a pop-up installation and a miniature concert hall. Nothing fixed, but rather a playful intervention in everyday urban life. Inspired by the legendary Dream House, a potentially infinite light-and-sound installation by the American Minimalist La Monte Young and his wife Marian Zazeela, musicians of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) fill this temporary space with the seemingly endless sustained tones of Young’s groundbreaking Trio for Strings. Step inside and listen to this ethereal, hypnotic music unfolding in slow motion.

“American Dream House”

She’s celebrating in style: to mark the 50th anniversary of her Lucerne stage debut, Anne-Sophie Mutter is popping the corks and performing three violin concertos and a solo piece in a single evening! And on top of that, she’s taking on the musical direction of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra herself — anything but an easygoing program. The works she has chosen are, for her, all “projects of the heart.” She introduced herself to the public with a Mozart concerto at her very first orchestral appearance at the age of nine, and Mozart also marked her first recording: the 1978 album with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Herbert von Karajan. André Previn, who was much more than just an artistic partner to her, composed numerous new works for Mutter, including his Violin Concerto No. 2 — one of 34 scores she has premiered so far. Among the most recent pieces she has launched is Likoo, a solo work by the Iranian composer Aftab Darvishi. It traces deep longings: the feelings of women who have lost their loved ones or their homeland, or who have to fight for their rights.

She is just 21 years old and has already created a stir on the international stage: born in Sapporo, Japan, Yuki Hirano won the 2024 Vienna Classical Violin Competition at the Classical Violin Olympus and emerged in the spring of 2025 as the winner of the International Jascha Heifetz Competition in Vilnius, where she also received numerous special prizes. The secret to her success? “If the audience can enjoy the music, I’m happy,” says the student of Pavel Vernikov at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. 

Yuki Hirano | Chizu Miyamoto

Sometimes all it takes is simply clapping your hands to create complex yet deeply grooving rhythms. In keeping with the Festival theme “American Dreams,” a percussion quartet from the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) presents four works by Steve Reich, including his iconic Clapping Music and Drumming. One of the masterminds of American Minimalism, Reich sets simple motifs and rhythms in continuous loops, gradually shifting them against one another to create intricate polyrhythmic patterns with a mesmerizing flow.

“Rhythm ’n’ Loops”

Kapellplatz

Weinmarkt

“Ms New Orleans,” “Lady Louis,” “Queen Clarinet”: these are just some of Doreen Ketchens’s nicknames. In Lucerne, the American clarinetist joins young musicians of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO). Through workshops and shared performances, they immerse themselves in New Orleans’s rich musical heritage to develop a program over the course of a week – a “work in progress” shaped by exchange between the Old and New Worlds.

“Reflecting the Streets of New Orleans”

At this concert, you might just solve a mystery. On 19 June 1899, Edward Elgar scored an unprecedented triumph with the world premiere of his Enigma Variations. The event was hailed as the rebirth of English music, which for two centuries — ever since the death of Henry Purcell — had played little role on the international stage. Only one thing puzzled listeners: what was the theme Elgar had actually varied in his masterpiece? The composer stubbornly refused to divulge it, and speculation ran wild. Was it the British national anthem? Rule, Britannia!? Or the folk tune Auld Lang Syne? To this day, no one has cracked the secret . . . Tchaikovsky, by contrast, left no questions unanswered with regard to his Fourth Symphony: he spelled out its program exactly.

Berliner Philharmoniker | Kirill Petrenko

By request! The Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) moves from the KKL into Lucerne’s Old Town and transforms into a live jukebox. You help decide what gets played. The repertoire prepared for these four interactive concerts ranges from Vivaldi and Beethoven to Smetana’s Vltava and Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And, in keeping with the Festival theme, it also includes music by Gershwin, Bernstein, and John Adams. Conductor Joseph Sieber serves as host, guiding you through the program.

“Symphonic Jukebox”

When a violinist makes a debut with a top orchestra like the Berliner Philharmoniker, it’s no easy task. After all, seated around them are more than two dozen violinists who often perform as soloists themselves — and who listen with correspondingly sharp ears. All the more remarkable, then, was Augustin Hadelich’s first appearance with the “Berliners” in 2021: the wish to perform with him actually came from within the orchestra itself — a true badge of honor.

Berliner Philharmoniker | Kirill Petrenko | Augustin Hadelich

This pianist fits into no mold. Bridget Yee was born in Malaysia in 2004, came to London at age eleven to study, and went on to win the Windsor International Piano Competition, among others. Yet she doesn’t shine only at the keyboard: she also trained as a cellist and double bassist, performing in orchestral concerts under Jac van Steen and Benjamin Zander. That broadened her horizons, she says — and benefits her piano playing, too.

Bridget Yee

Is madness a means of escaping reality? Or — on the contrary — a way of confronting it? With his monodrama Eight Songs for a Mad King, Peter Maxwell Davies created in 1968 a brilliantly crafted character study of the deranged British monarch George III, whose reign began in 1760, drawing on the king’s own original texts. Seductive melodies stand alongside dissonances in this modern music-theater classic, which sketches a portrait of emotional and mental disintegration: they are provocative, yet at the same time reveal a startling lucidity.

Luzerner Theater Opera Ensemble | Lucerne Symphony Orchestra | Maria Radzikhovskiy | Marie Lambert-Le Bihan

Lucerne Theatre

Finland has only 5,5 million inhabitants — a good third fewer than Switzerland — yet it keeps astonishing the music world with a steady stream of outstanding new talent. Central Europe can only marvel. The conductor leading the fabulous Concertgebouw Orchestra when it comes to Lucerne this summer is also a Finn: 40-year-old Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Chief Conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra.

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra | Santtu-Matias Rouvali | Víkingur Ólafsson

New Orleans is widely regarded as the birthplace of jazz. In the late 19th century, numerous brass bands sprang up all over the city. With trumpets and trombones, clarinets, saxophones, sousaphones, and banjos, they marched as “second line” ensembles in parades and funerals, shaping the city’s sound – a distinctive blend of musical styles that combines European marches with African rhythms. The Swiss quintet Dixie-Ramblers, which has performed in New Orleans and aboard the legendary Mississippi paddle steamer Natchez, brings this fascinating cultural melting pot to Lucerne. It performs concerts on Kapellplatz and Kornmarkt and also makes its way through the Old Town streets as a marching band.

In the Streets: City Stage

“Dixieland Marching Band”

Turning brass into gold: five young trumpeters from Great Britain, Sweden, and Ukraine know the formula that countless alchemists have sought in vain. Founded four years ago at London’s Royal Academy of Music, Fiveby5 produces a radiant, golden brass sound with a brilliant sheen and has already won numerous prizes. Most recently, the quintet won the prestigious Philip Jones International Brass Ensemble Competition in 2025. This success has, among other things, led to their appearance at “In the Streets: City Stage”: the varied program ranges from Bach, Rameau, and Mozart to the rousing Hoe-Down from Aaron Copland’s cowboy ballet Rodeo.

“Brass Spectacular in Memory of Philip Jones”

The charismatic Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin has been a regular guest at Lucerne Festival for the last 15 years — and one of its great audience favorites. He has appeared here with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and often with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra: each time a musical high point.

The Met Orchestra | Yannick Nézet-Séguin | Joyce DiDonato

Collegium Musicum Luzern soloists, choir, and orchestra | Jakob Pilgram | Suzanne Z'Graggen

Jesuitenkirche Luzern

Like a researcher, composer-in-residence Mark Andre explores the possibilities of an instrument. Over several years he worked closely with the bassist Frank Reinecke. The result is a nearly three-quarter-hour solo piece that coaxes from the double bass an entire world of new and unusual sounds, directing our attention to the ephemeral, the unstable, the fragile. It pushes right up to the edge of the audible — for instance when the lowest string of the double bass is tuned even lower, down to an ultra-low E — and seeks, precisely through this, to let something transcendent, something metaphysical, shimmer through. 

Jörg Widmann | Frank Reinecke | SWR Experimentalstudio

Lucerne School of Music

Make American History Great Again? Endangered Dreams is the title that the African American composer Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson, who lives in Biel, has given his new ensemble piece. He says he is responding to “the present situation in America, where there is a battle of American identity and history taking place right now. There are factions in America who want to re-write American history and to delete the unpleasant parts of that history — and to sanitize the American Dream of its blemishes. Which means essentially to turn this dream into a one-sided lie.” Just how multifaceted America sounds becomes clear in the rest of the program: Steve Reich, one of the pioneers of Minimalism, fuses two marimbas and two vibraphones into an ecstatically pulsing rhythm machine in his Mallet Quartet. Elliott Carter’s music, by contrast, is deeply rooted in both American and European modernism.

Ensemble of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) | Participants in the Contemporary-Conducting Program | Doreen Ketchens

She was born in 1941, he in 1989: two generations stand between the legendary pianist Martha Argerich and the young Israeli maestro Lahav Shani — yet when they meet, sparks fly. When they first appeared together in Tel Aviv in 2019, with Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto, the applause seemed endless. Since then, they have made music together regularly: she at the keyboard and he on the podium. Or even in recitals for two pianos, or for four hands in encores — for Shani is himself a pianist of distinction. 

Munich Philharmonic | Lahav Shani | Martha Argerich

Gen Z knows him as “Cateen,” the hip YouTuber and cat enthusiast with more than 1,5 million followers. Behind the social-media star — whose artful clips have racked up over 200 million views — is the Japanese pianist Hayato Sumino, born in 1995. And you can hear him live in the Concert Hall, now for the first time at Lucerne Festival, and marvel at what he can do at the piano. Sumino doesn’t shy away from the toughest virtuoso challenges, including the wild demands of Guido Agosti’s piano transcription of excerpts from Stravinsky’s Firebird. But the idea behind the program matters even more to him: he has built his Lucerne debut around Frédéric Chopin, interweaving Chopin pieces with his own neoclassically styled compositions and improvisations. Works by Thomas Adès and Camille Saint-Saëns also enter this “Chopin orbit” with ease. Teenagers and 20-somethings flock to his concerts — no surprise he recently won the “Opus Klassik” audience award. Yet Sumino is far more than a media phenomenon: he refined his artistry with Jean-Marc Luisada and also studied at IRCAM in Paris.

Hayato Sumino

The jury was unanimous: the 2025 Music Prize of the German Economy goes to the young baritone Jonas Müller! Born in Lower Bavaria in 1999, Müller could celebrate not only the € 15,000 award but also his debut concert at Lucerne Festival. He impressed with an intelligent program that, as the jury noted, was “marked by authenticity and seriousness.” He follows the same principle in his Lucerne recital. Under the theme “Somewhere in the World,” he sings of longing for faraway places and for home, of dreams of love and of solitude — with settings by Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann, Gustav Mahler and Hanns Eisler. From Eisler, he performs six songs from the Hollywood Songbook: his contribution to this summer’s theme, “American Dreams.” Jonas Müller has already won numerous prizes, including as a duo with his piano partner Anna Gebhardt. Since the fall of 2025, the student of Christian Gerhaher has been a member of the Opera Studio of Oper Frankfurt, where he made his debut as Guglielmo in Mozart’s Così fan tutte. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung praised him for “vocal elegance and a fine touch of comedy.”

Jonas Müller | Anna Gebhardt

Lukaskirche Lucerne

“I had hoped I wouldn’t fall in love with another orchestra, but in fact I did,” sighs Sir Simon Rattle. And who is the mysterious new love? The Freiburger Barockorchester. Their Schumann evening in Lucerne reveals exactly what this newfound happiness sounds like. The orchestra plays with clarity and lightness, in shimmering colors yet firmly grounded. The program opens with the highly romantic overture to Schumann’s only opera, Genoveva. Isabelle Faust — whose violin sound is so human and communicative, and whose phrasing is unmatched in its delicacy — then performs the Violin Concerto. Schumann wrote it shortly before his mental collapse, and it did not receive its world premiere until 81 years after his death. “It’s music that moves you deeply,” Faust says. The same is certainly true of the Second Symphony, which many consider Schumann’s finest. Its unearthly beautiful slow movement has something of a prayer of thanksgiving about it: Schumann continually unfolds an enthralling melody, letting it rise and expand until it seems to glow — ten minutes of eternity.

Freiburger Barockorchester | Sir Simon Rattle | Isabelle Faust

Supporting young musicians is especially close to Anne-Sophie Mutter’s heart. To this end, she founded the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation in 2008 and can now look back on an impressive roster of distinguished scholarship recipients, including Vilde Frang, Sergey Khachatryan, Daniel Müller-Schott, and Kian Soltani. Her latest discovery is Elias David Moncado, born in 2000: a German-Spanish-Malaysian violinist who won the Grand Prix and ten special prizes at the Karol Lipiński Competition in Poland, gave his first recital at New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2025, and will release his debut album on the Warner Classics label in 2026. For this Lucerne debut, he will perform Maurice Ravel’s irresistible Violin Sonata, an American-inspired work with a “blue” movement at its center. Playing the “Ludwig, ex-Szigeti” Stradivari, he will also tackle high-virtuoso fare such as Franz Waxman’s finger-breaking Carmen Fantasie. And four more of Mutter’s protégés will also appear in this extraordinary debut concert, performing two brand-new pieces that Anne-Sophie Mutter commissioned especially for them to mark the 50th anniversary of her Lucerne stage debut — works now receiving their world premieres. For championing new music is another of this great virtuoso’s passions.

Elias David Moncado | David Tobin | Ye-Eun Choi | Hwayoon Lee | Lionel Martin | Lauma Skride

Everyone wants to book him right now: Alexandre Kantorow, the pianist born in 1997 who, seven years ago, became the first French winner of the Gold Medal at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition and received the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award in 2023. He has already performed with such world-class orchestras as the Berlin and New York Philharmonics and played Ravel’s Jeux d’eau in pouring rain at the opening of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games — an artist who captivates audiences with the poetry of his interpretations. For his Lucerne Festival debut, Kantorow turns to one of his favorite composers: Johannes Brahms, whose First Piano Concerto seems almost written for eleven or twelve fingers, so formidable are its challenges. But Kantorow fears neither the massive chords nor the filigree passagework. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Manfred Honeck then present a milestone of the Russian repertoire: Dmitri Shostakovich’s multilayered Fifth Symphony. With this work, written after being publicly denounced by Stalin’s “cultural guardians,” Shostakovich attempted to step out of the line of fire and wrote a bombastic, triumphal finale. But the real message can be heard between the lines.

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra | Manfred Honeck | Alexandre Kantorow

Festival Strings Lucerne | Daniel Dodds

KKL Luzern

Everyone has seemed to want to write for her: Anne-Sophie Mutter’s artistry has inspired many of today’s leading composers to create new works. The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki wrote no fewer than four pieces for her. The first was his large-scale Second Violin Concerto from 1995. Titled Metamorphosen, its six movements explore transformation and renewal — shifting among different states of mind and between tradition and modernity. Interpreting this concerto, Mutter admits, is “a physical and psychological challenge that I accept with gratitude.” At her side is one of America’s finest orchestras, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Under its Music Director Manfred Honeck, the second half of the program is devoted to Antonín Dvořák’s exhilarating Symphony From the New World, the very archetype of a musical “American Dream.” Dvořák intended the work to show the United States a path toward its own Promised Land of classical music, with a distinctly American musical voice — which is why we hear echoes of African American spirituals as well as melodies and dance rhythms of Indigenous peoples woven into his Ninth.

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra | Manfred Honeck | Anne-Sophie Mutter

In 2024, “artiste étoile” Augustin Hadelich released his award-winning album American Road Trip, a homage to the country he now calls home. The recording embraces not only classical repertoire but also jazz and ragtime, country and bluegrass. “When I came to the U.S. more than 20 years ago, I immediately fell in love with the country — and with its music, which is itself a melting pot,” Hadelich recalls. Just how deeply America’s musical diversity has become his own native tongue is something he’ll demonstrate in Lucerne with his Fiddle Night. Joining him are two giants of the folk scene: Maggie and Mark O’Connor. Mark O’Connor has won three Grammy Awards — including one with his wife — and has been named Musician of the Year by the Country Music Association seven times. Collaborating with classical stars is nothing new for him. Now, the O’Connors appear on stage with Hadelich for the first time. In doing so, they echo Leonard Bernstein’s conviction: “I draw no distinction between popular music and classical music. There is only good music and bad music.”

Augustin Hadelich | Mark O’Connor | Maggie O’Connor

Mention Mozart’s G minor Symphony, and you tend to think of the “Great” one that belongs to the middle of his legendary final symphonic trilogy — the one that opens with a motif that has even had an afterlife as a mobile ringtone. But there is also the “Little” G minor: a youthful, wild work by the 17-year-old Mozart that is driven by an expression of unbridled fury and sharp dynamic contrasts — the very embodiment of Sturm und Drang. With the Ossetian conductor Tugan Sokhiev on the podium, the Vienna Philharmonic will reveal this “other” Mozart, who was anything but delicate rococo. They will then unleash the storms of life and love with Gustav Mahler’s autobiographically inspired First Symphony. Sokhiev holds a special affection for Mahler’s debut symphony and finds it distinctly dramatic: “For me, Mahler is always a man of the theater,” he says. “He had specific images in mind as he composed. Close your eyes in the first movement and you feel as though you’re standing in the middle of nature. The third movement, with its procession of animals that don’t quite know whether they’re celebrating the hunter’s death or mourning it, is full of irony. And in the finale, life triumphs.

Vienna Philharmonic | Tugan Sokhiev

Composer-in-residence Mark Andre has created an entire cycle of iv pieces. The title’s abbreviation stands for “introverted,” pointing to a journey into the interior of sound: fragile, pared-down music that operates at the edge of perception yet unfolds enormous intensity and opens a door to spiritual realms. His organ piece iv 15. Himmelfahrt deals with “processes of disappearance,” which Andre associates “with the situation of the Ascension, the dissolution of the body — or, in music, of the sonic body.” At one point, he even has the blower motor switched off during performance, reducing the wind pressure, and he further colors the sound through unusual registrations. “This creates a different kind of virtuosity — one where you’re not necessarily working with pitches, but with registrations,” explains the organist Stephan Heuberger. In the most recent work of the series, the duo iv 19. Pfingsten — Echos, premiered in 2025, Mark Andre calls for the unusual pairing of organ and double bass: two instruments with enormous ranges, yet utterly distinct in their sound worlds.

Stephan Heuberger | Frank Reinecke

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

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

HSLU Ensemble

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Thomas Ospital

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

Ecstasy through repetition: that’s the recipe of Minimalism. It repeats simple melodic patterns over and over, altering them only slightly — and became one of America’s most important contributions to 20th-century music history. Michael Gordon, one of the co-founders of the legendary New York collective Bang on a Can alongside Julia Wolfe and David Lang, follows in the footsteps of Minimalist pioneers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass. But his music is also unmistakably infused with rock. Trance opens with a striking electric bass riff; saxophones, synthesizers, and electric guitar create a raw, intensely powerful ensemble sound. In this 1995 work, Gordon lets short motifs collide and builds, from complex, constantly shifting rhythms, a fiercely pulsating 50-minute rush: edgy, rhythmically vibrant music that drives toward an ecstatic climax, enriched with samples of Buddhist and Gregorian chants.

Ensemble Helix/Hochschule Luzern — Musik Studio for Contemporary Music | Gregory Charette

Hochschule Luzern

Summertime, It Ain’t Necessarily So, I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’: in Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin strings together one hit after another. That can make it easy to forget that he did not compose a glittering Broadway musical but a groundbreaking serious opera — even if it sounds less like Wagner or Verdi and more like spirituals and jazz. It tackles unemployment and poverty, drugs and murder — and at its center is the tragic love story between the disabled beggar Porgy and the troubled Bess. Above all, however, the opera takes place within an African American community — for the first time in the history of musical theater. That was an act of courage in the 1930s, at the height of racial discrimination — one just as bold as Gershwin’s insistence that Porgy and Bess be performed exclusively by Black singers. At Lucerne Festival, you can experience America’s most famous and successful opera with the ensemble of Cape Town Opera, South Africa’s only opera company. And the acclaimed Chineke! Orchestra — returning to Lake Lucerne after its enthusiastic reception in the summers of 2022 and 2024 — is likewise composed predominantly of People of Color.

Chineke! Orchestra | Cape Town Opera | Enrique Mazzola

The piercing call of the carnyx likely sounded across Lake Lucerne more than 2,000 years ago, when Celtic tribes settled in Central Switzerland. Liza Lim has composed a concerto for this ancient bronze trumpet, nearly two meters long, asking herself “how ancient lineages of human and more-than-human creativity reside in bodies, cultural artefacts and the Deep Time histories of place, carrying seeds of resilience and also potential danger that may yet bloom again.” Far less exotic is the second solo instrument of the evening, the clarinet. Yet composer-in-residence Mark Andre — inspired by extensive sound experiments with Jörg Widmann — coaxes from it a wealth of entirely new timbres. 

Lucerne Festival

8 - 10 May, 2026

Víkingur Ólafsson | Olafur Eliasson

May 14, 2026

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

May 15, 2026

Danish String Quartet

May 15, 2026

Danish String Quartet | Víkingur Ólafsson

May 16, 2026

Víkingur Ólafsson

Lucerne Festival