Lucerne Festival News
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2024-04-23
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2024-03-19 10:29:00
Venice's Golden Lion: composer Rebecca Saunders receives Lifetime Achievement award from the Biennale Musica
[…] investigation into and experimentation with the experience of listening. Her elaboration of the sonic material is profoundly speculative and at the same time powerfully empirical and material, tied to the performance and the playing strategies" [from citation]Rebecca Saunders studied composition with Nigel Osborne in Edinburgh and Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe, and in 2019, she became the first woman to receive the Ernst-von-Siemens award. Saunders' piano concerto, To An Utterance was premiered in 2021 by the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra, at the Lucerne Festival with pianist Nicholas Hodges [see my 2020 interview with Nicholas], and she was composer in residence with the Dresdner Philharmonie for 2021/2022.Full details from the Biennale website.
2024-02-23 18:56:49
Queen Elizabeth Hall, LondonThe violinist leads an unsparing assault of pieces from Biber’s dissonant Battalia à 10 to Ustvolskaya’s Composition No 2 as sirens bellow and metronomes tick down our existence ‘This piece of theatre without a plot is designed as an assault on our senses,” violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja writes of Dies Irae, a complex multimedia piece of her own devising, part concert, part installation, that aims to combine a ferocious enactment of the day of judgment with fierce invective against war and the climate crisis as instruments of our own potential self-destruction. It was first heard at the Lucerne Festival in 2017. Kopatchinskaja has performed it with multiple ensembles since, including the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, in Glasgow, during Cop26 in 2021. For the London premiere her collaborators were the Aurora Orchestra and Aurora Voices, whose intensity match Kopatchinskaja’s uncompromising vision and the almost dogged commitment of her playing.It’s […]
2024-02-05 15:57:39
Alban Berg, Part I, Early Years, 2024
[…] cut short. The Viennese public’s response could be expected, if not necessarily in its physical form (after all, their favorite music was Strauss’s waltzes), but how many American presenters would dare to program such a concert in our time, more than 100 years later? We can listen to Berg’s songs that were performed during the concert, no. 2 of op. 4 here and no. 3 here. The soprano is Renée Flemming; Claudio Abbado leads the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. We’ll continue with Berg and his two masterpieces, operas Wozzeck and Lulu, next week.
2024-02-05 15:53:01
Alban Berg - Lieder Op. 4, no. 3Renée Flemming (Conductor)Lucerne Festival Orchestra (Orchestra)Claudio Abbado (Conductor)