The Top Festival Debut in China
Return of Conductor Claudio Abbado after 36 years
With authentic music from Lucerne Festival

NCPA will see the premiere of world-renowned Lucerne Festival in China on September 20-25, 2009. Conductor Claudio Abbado, "King of Conduction", the original orchestra of the Festival and other musical masters will stage four symphonic concerts (conducted by Maestro Abbado) and two chamber concerts. In addition, two masters of Chinese descent will definitely highlight the Lucerne Festival in Beijing. They are: Yujia Wang the Goddess of Piano, who won her fame at the age of 22 and will be on stage with Abbado on September 20; and Tan Dun, a famous musician who will present brilliant performances as the conductor with Mahler Chamber Orchestra on September 23. It is safe to predict that the Lucerne Festival 2009 will be a great musical event of both China and the world.

Lucerne Festival
With deep-rooted art and music culture, the City of Lucerne is a renowned Festival City and famous for its Lucerne Music Festival, which attracts over 100,000 music lovers across the globe throughout the three seasons annually. Lucerne Festival looks back on a long tradition of own orchestras that began in 1938 with Arturo Toscanini and the legendary Concert de Gala. Nowadays, Lucerne Festival has already become one of the most important music festivals, both in Switzerland and internationally. The Festival is composed of three separate occasions every year: at Easter, in Summer and at the Piano.

In 2009, on the initiative of Maestro Claudio Abbado and Artistic Director Michael Haefliger, this world-renowned festival is for the first time coming to China in September and will hold a series of orchestra concerts, chamber music concerts with other activities such as master classes at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing, the top sanctuary of music in China.

Conductor: Claudio Abbado
Claudio Abbado was born into a family of musicians in Milan. He studied piano, conducting, and composition at the Milan Conservatory and then moved to Vienna, where he studied under Hans Swarowsky at the Vienna Music Academy. He won the Koussevitzky Prize in Tanglewood in 1958 and received the first prize at the Mitropoulos Competition in New York in 1963, which earned him the position of assistant to Leonard Bernstein. Herbert von Karajan invited Abbado to the Salzburg Festival in 1965, where he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic. In the following year, he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic. From 1968 to 1986, Abbado was musical director of La Scala, Milan, where he established his reputation as an innovator keen to promote contemporary music and “Regietheater” (director’s theater). He is also widely acclaimed for having opened the venue to a more-diverse audience. During his time at La Scala, Abbado’s international career also flourished. He was chief conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1988, directed the Vienna State Opera from 1986 to 1991, and was appointed director of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1989. Abbado took over the leadership of the Salzburg Easter Festival in 1994. After leaving Berlin in 2002, he formed the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which has played yearly since 2003. Encouraging young musical talent is a cause close to Abbado’s heart. In 1978, he was one of the founders of the European Community Youth Orchestra and later helped to set up the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. In 1986, he launched the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and, in 2004, the Orchestra Mozart. Abbado has received countless awards, including the Siemens-Musikpreis in 1994 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2003.

Conductor: Tan Dun
The conceptual and multifaceted composer/conductor Tan Dun has made an indelible mark on the world's music scene with a creative repertoire that spans the boundaries of classical music, multimedia performance, and Eastern and Western traditions. A winner of today's most prestigious honors including the Grammy Award, Oscar/Academy Award, Grawemeyer Award for classical composition and Musical America's Composer of The Year. As one of the world’s most active and illustrious composer of his time, Tan Dun's music has been played throughout the world by the leading orchestras, opera houses, international festivals, on radio and television.

Piano Solo: Yuja Wang
Chinese pianist Yuja Wang, who was born in 1987 in Beijing, began piano studies at the age of six and went on to study at the Beijing Central Conservatory. At 14, she moved to Canada to attend the Mount Royal College in Calgary. The following year, she studied with Gary Graffman at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she received her degree in 2008. Already in 2003 Yuja Wang made her debut playing Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich, and in 2005 she made her debut at the National Arts Center Orchestra in Ottawa under the baton of Pinchas Zukerman. Appearances have since followed with almost all of the eminent American ensembles, including the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras, the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. She participated in the New York Philharmonic’s high-profile tour of Japan und Korea under Lorin Maazel, she has appeared with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic under Yuri Temirkanov in Great Britain and the Netherlands, and hse substituted for an ailing Murray Perahia to play with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in its United States tour in 2008. As a recitalist, Yuja Wang has appeared at the Aspen, Gilmore, Santa Fe, Schleswig-Holstein, and Verbier Festivals, and she has also concertized in Washington, D.C., Chicago, London, Paris, and Munich. In the 2008-09 season she turned her focus toward Europe, appearing with the London Symphony Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas and touring with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Charles Dutoit through Belgium and Spain – as well as performing with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra under Claudio Abbado. In April 2009 Yuja Wang released her first CD, on which she plays works by Chopin, Ligeti, Scriabin, and Liszt.

Soprano: Rachel Harnisch
As a concert soloist, Harnisch’s renderings of masterpieces of Mozart, Haydn, Pergolesi, Bach, Brahms, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Debussy, Mahler, Nono are successful and memorable. She has worked with the world renowned conductors like Claudio Abbado, Kent Nagano, Neville Marriner, Muhai Tang, Christian Zacharias, Christopher Hogwood, Roberto Abbado and Franz Welser-Möst and major European orchestras. She has held solo concerts and sang opera productions in Milano, Florence, Torino, Naples, Zurich, Geneva, Munich, Berlin, Brussels, Paris and Santiago de Chile.

Lucerne Festival Orchestra
When Claudio Abbado and Michael Haefliger founded the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which has opened the summer season every year since 2003, they were, in a way, harking back to the birth of the Lucerne Festival in 1938. At that time, Arturo Toscanini first brought together an elite orchestra to play the legendary "Concert de Gala." With this model in mind, in 2009, renowned soloists will once again converge under the leadership of Claudio Abbado to work on and perform selected pieces from the symphonic repertoire. The core of the orchestra is drawn from the fifty members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Performing as principals will be such musicians as violinist Kolja Blacher; violist Wolfram Christ; cellists Jens Peter Maintz and Clemens Hagen; and double bass player Alois Posch. Wind soloists will include flautist Jacques Zoon, horn player Bruno Schneider and trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich.

Mahler Chamber Orchestra
The Mahler Chamber Orchestra (MCO) was founded in 1997 by former members of the  Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra and is dedicated to repertoire that ranges from works for larger ensemble through the symphonic literature to classical opera and world premieres. A total of 42 musicians from 22 nations form the core of this independently financed orchestra, which can also be augmented with additional forces as needed. Along with cofounder Claudio Abbado, Daniel Harding has had a lasting influence on the orchestra’s evolution, first as its principal guest conductor and then, as of 2003, as principal music director. Since 2008 he has been chief conductor. The orchestra had its breakthrough to international acclaim as early as 1998 with a new production of Don Giovanni at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, conducted by Claudio Abbado. Eminent productions that ensued have included Britten’s The Turn of the Screw (production by Luc Bondy) and of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (in the Irina Brook production), under the baton of Daniel Harding. Patrice Chéreau directed Mozart’s Così fan tutte (2005) and Janáček’s From the House of the Dead (2007) in productions that also appeared in Vienna and Amsterdam. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra gives two annual concert series in Ferrara, Italy. Since 2003 the musicians of the MCO have performed as guest artists with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, in addition to their own appearances as the MCO. Throughout its artistic development, the MCO has attracted renowned guest conductors and soloists, including Vladimir Ashkenazy, Philippe Herreweghe, Christopher Hogwood, and Paavo Järvi as well as Martha Argerich, Emanuel Ax, Cecilia Bartoli, and Christian Tetzlaff. 

Performance Schedule：
Performance: Chamber Concert by Lucerne Festival Orchestra Musicians
Dates: September 20, 2009   11:00

Performance: Lucerne Festival Orchestra Concert
Conductor: Claudio Abbado
Piano Solo: Yuja Wang
Dates: September 20 - 21, 2009   19:30

Performance: Mahler Chamber Orchestra Concert
Conductor: Tan Dun
Violin: Kolja Blacher
Viola: Wolfram Christ 
Dates: September 23, 2009   19:30

Performance: Lucerne Festival Orchestra Concert
Conductor: Claudio Abbado
Soprano: Rachel Harnisch
Dates: September 24 - 25, 2009   19:30