Next summer he takes up his new post as Chief Conductor of the Staatskapelle Dresden, and starting in 2013 he will assume directorship of the Salzburg Easter Festival. LUCERNE FESTIVAL audiences can hear the highly sought-after Christian Thielemann next week, when he returns to Lucerne after an interval of nine years to conduct “his” new orchestra. For his concerts on 9 and 10 September Thielemann has chosen to combine late-romantic rarities by Ferruccio Busoni and Hans Pfitzner with works by two composers who have always been especially dear to him: the First Symphony of Brahms and Bruckner’s monumental Eighth.

The Staatskapelle Dresden can look back on a grand Bruckner tradition, to which former chief conductors such as Karl Böhm, Herbert Blomstedt, Bernard Haitink, and Giuseppe Sinopoli made significant contributions. And now Christian Thielemann continues the tradition. In September 2009 his interpretation of the Eighth Symphony, which he has also programmed for one of his two Lucerne appearances, wowed both the audience and the orchestra in Dresden so profoundly that the Staatskapelle musicians immediately offered him the post of Chief Conductor.  “If you really want to understand Bruckner,” explains Thielemann, “you have to come to grips with his slowness—his music is not fiery as such. For listeners today, that means rediscovering slowness. Inevitably they find that this slowness indeed contains an incredible fire. But it blazes beneath the surface.”

When it comes to Brahms as well, Thielemann prefers the warm, transparent sonority which is cultivated by the Staatskapelle players. This unique “Brahms sound”—“beautifully dark, especially in the scoring for clarinet, viola, and cello, which he loves so much”—is, for Thielemann, a “legacy of northern Germany, the legacy of a foggy November day in the North German lowlands. It creates such a unique mood, so that when you’re able to relax by the fireplace or with a steaming soup, your sense of joy and gratitude becomes all the more intense. This is what the North sounds like for me.”