Lucerne festival 2024 review – from blazing Bruckner to a Georgian wunderkind

A lone horn call, then a brief, mighty climax, full orchestra playing fortissimo. The Symphony No 7 by Anton Bruckner, the 200th anniversary of whose birth falls on Wednesday, ends like an intake of breath. The noisy rampage of these final bars, which could go on at length as Bruckner often does, stops abruptly: one terse chord, a single beat in an otherwise empty bar. In a live performance, there might be a sense of surprise – is that the end? – though we can always rely on a keen (for which read maddening) bravo to tell us, several split seconds too soon, that yes, it is indeed all over.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducting the Lucerne Festival Orchestra at the KKL concert hall in Lucerne last weekend, managed something exceptional. In a transparent, flowing but never hurried performance, he made Bruckner’s finale more than the usual exuberant close of a big romantic work. The momentum was so urgent, so intense, it became a glimpse into the abyss. Bruckner, typified as the lonely eccentric (the word simpleton has been used), was here seen as radical, daring, pushing all to the limit. Silence was the only retort. Nézet-Séguin, arms aloft, defied anyone, orchestra or audience, to move. We remained stock still, as we might at the end of a Bach Passion but not a Bruckner symphony. At last he dropped his arms, and the standing ovation erupted.
That might seem a long description for a mere 20 or so bars of music. Nézet-Séguin and his players deserve the attention. The Canadian, who is music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera, New York, is now among the tiny handful of top-rated conductors in the world. He was at the month-long Lucerne festival, one of Europe’s older such events, as an enthusiastically received guest of the orchestra. This ensemble of first-class musicians – orchestral principals, chamber players, a few soloists – abandon their usual commitments and gather in the summer to perform at the highest level. In the same concert the Italian pianist Beatrice Rana, who has recorded with Nézet-Séguin, was the nuanced and perceptive soloist in Clara Schumann’s Piano Concerto.
Later the same night – events, many free, occur throughout the day, in different venues, by the lake, out in the street – the British cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason, one of this year’s featured artists, gave a duo recital with the Brazilian guitarist Plínio Fernandes. The intimate Lucerne theatre, lights low, proved ideal for a late-night programme with a South American emphasis. Opening with Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Aria (Cantilena) from Bachianas Brasileiras No 5, they ended with two numbers from Astor Piazzolla’s Histoire du Tango, performing specially arranged repertoire in between. The free exchange of instruments, equal-voiced, proved novel and rewarding. Elegie à une mémoire oubliée, written for them by the Brazilian composer Rafael Marino Arcaro (b.1990), was delicate and affecting. All three studied at London’s Royal Academy of Music.
The visible part of this Swiss festival is the glamorous roster of orchestras and soloists. The bedrock of its activities, however, central to its purpose and vision, is largely out of view. The Lucerne Festival Academy (together with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra), founded by Pierre Boulez and the festival’s director, Michael Haefliger, is 20 years old this year. It attracts young composers, conductors and musicians from all over the world – around 100 each year – supporting them financially and enabling them to experiment. The focus is music of today (today being a loose term extending back to the mid 20th century, bearing in mind Stravinsky, born in 1882, is still considered “today” in some circles).
Concerts are given, workshop-style, and discussions held. Listen, don’t try to analyse, was the main message of the Swiss composer Dieter Ammann, running the composing seminar showcase in the absence of the influential German composer Wolfgang Rihm, artistic director from 2016 until his death in July. Ammann’s advice was vital. Hearing, as I did, four new orchestral works, with four different conductors, and three chamber performances by different players in the space of two days had the feel of a (highly enjoyable) Mensa test. The British conductor Joséphine Korda and British-German composer Eden Lonsdale, both with growing reputations, were among the lineup.
The last concert I attended was a recital by another of the festival’s star artists, the Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili. She was joined by two grant holders from the foundation she set up in 2021 to help musicians from her homeland. The 23-year-old Giorgi Gigashvili, a BBC New Generation artist and recipient of many international prizes – he also plays in an electronic band – is already a formidable performer. He was a sensitive partner to Batiashvili in César Franck’s Violin Sonata.
The other was Tsotne Zedginidze, who has just turned 15. I have come to him late in the day: his CV is already longer than most four times his age, and includes association with names such as Brendel, Rattle, Pappano, Barenboim. This prodigious young composer-pianist played a sparky, virtuosic, toccata-like work of his own, as well as preludes by Debussy and, with Batiashvili, the same composer’s Violin Sonata. Musically bursting with confidence but modest too, Zedginidze still studies with his grandmother. We will watch his progress, agog.
At Zedginidze’s age, Alexander Goehr, who had the brilliance of wit and intellect to choose almost any profession, decided to become a composer. His conductor father, Walter, who had studied with Arnold Schoenberg, cautioned him against, in vain. Goehr died last week, aged 92, the oldest and longest surviving of a trio of composers who met in Manchester as students, the others being Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle. Together, though their paths separated, they changed the landscape of British music.
As well as leaving a body of fine compositions of his own, as professor of music at Cambridge Goehr taught a generation of composers, including Thomas Adès, Julian Anderson and George Benjamin. Benjamin will be working with the young composers in Lucerne this week. He may be poignantly alert to his new seniority in a lineage that, with only a couple of twists and turns, goes straight back to Bruckner.