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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Programs
Mozart
"Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio", K. 418
Mozart
"Nehmt meinen Dank, ihr holden Gönner", K. 383
Mahler
Symphony No. 4 in G major |
