Lucerne Festival

The Lucerne Festival is a summer music festival in Lucerne, Switzerland.It was founded in 1938 and, since 2004, it has taken place at the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre designed by Jean Nouvel. The two resident ensembles of the festival are the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and the Lucerne Festival Strings, which had most recently been led by the Italian conductor Claudio Abbado until his death.In addition to the performances, the Lucerne Festival Academy was founded by the composer Pierre Boulez in 2004 to train young musicians in the performance of modern music.

History

The festival started as a series of concerts in the gardens of Wagner's villa conducted by Arturo Toscanini, who had formed an orchestra with members of different orchestras and soloists for the concert. With the rise of the Nazi regime several major performers and conductors, including Toscanini, Fritz Busch and Bruno Walter decided not to perform in the traditional German and Austrian music festivals such as the Bayreuth Festival and Salzburg festival. The Lucerne Festival in Switzerland was a good place for those who did not want to perform in Germany.

Lucerne Festival Orchestra

The Lucerne Festival Orchestra is an ad hoc seasonal orchestra, based at the annual Lucerne Festival in Switzerland. The Lucerne Festival had featured a resident orchestra as far back as 1938, with Arturo Toscanini conducting the first concert of that ensemble. From 1943 until its disbandment in 1993, the festival orchestra consisted primarily of musicians from Switzerland. A few years later, a reconstituted festival orchestra arose, based around players from the Gustav Mahler-Jugend Orchester and the European Community Youth Orchestra (now the European Union Youth Orchestra).

The most recent incarnation of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra occurred at the instigation of the late Claudio Abbado (1933-2014), after a 2000 conversation with Lucerne Festival artistic director Michael Haefliger. The core of the ensemble is the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. The LFO features some soloists and orchestral principals from major orchestras in its ranks, including Kolja Blacher, Wolfram Christ, Mirijam Contzen, Diemut Poppen, Natalia Gutman, Jens-Peter Maintz, Jacques Zoon, Reinhold Friedrich, Stefan Dohr, Alessio Allegrini, Mark Templeton, Franz Bartolomey, Alois Posch, Emmanuel Pahud, Albrecht Mayer, Stefan Schweigert, members of the Sabine Meyer Wind Ensemble, the Alban Berg Quartet and Hagen Quartet. The orchestra also includes members of ensembles with whom Abbado had a connection, such as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

Claudio Abbado

Claudio Abbado, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI (Italian pronunciation: [ˈklaudjo abˈbaːdo]; 26 June 1933 – 20 January 2014) was an Italian conductor. One of the most celebrated and respected conductors of the 20th century, particularly in the music of Gustav Mahler, he served as music director of the La Scala opera house in Milan, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, principal guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, music director of the Vienna State Opera, and principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra.

Family history and early life

The Abbado family is descended from a Moorish king, Abdul Abbad, who had fled Al-Andalus hundreds of years earlier and arrived in Piedmont, Italy. In time, Abdul married an Italian and created a family estate that eventually was given the name "Castello Abaddo". The family changed their name to Abbado, and for several generations enjoyed both wealth and respect. Abbado's great-grandfather squandered the family fortune and reputation by gambling. His son, Abbado's grandfather, became a professor at the University of Turin. His grandfather re-established the family's reputation and also showed talent as an amateur musician.

Lucerne

Lucerne (/ˌluːˈsɜːrn/; German: Luzern, [luˈtsɛrn]; French: Lucerne, [lysɛʁn]; Italian: Lucerna, [luˈtʃɛrna]; Romansh: Lucerna; Lucerne Swiss-German: Lozärn) is a city in central Switzerland, in the German-speaking portion of the country. Lucerne is the capital of the Canton of Lucerne and the capital of the district of the same name. With a population of about 80,501 people, Lucerne is the most populous city in Central Switzerland, and a nexus of transportation, telecommunications, and government of this region. The city's urban area consists of 17 cities and towns located in three different cantons with an overall population of about 250,000 people.

Due to its location on the shore of Lake Lucerne (der Vierwaldstättersee), within sight of Mount Pilatus and Rigi in the Swiss Alps, Lucerne has long been a destination for tourists. One of the city's famous landmarks is the Chapel Bridge (Kapellbrücke), a wooden bridge first erected in the 14th century.

The official language of Lucerne is (the Swiss variety of Standard) German, but the main spoken language is the local variant of the Alemannic Swiss German dialect.

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler (7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was an Austrian late-Romantic composer, and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 his compositions were rediscovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.

Born in humble circumstances, Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky . Late in his life he was briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.