The cooperation essential to chamber music has served as an ideal for the artistic work of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA ever since its founding in 2003. This notion not only characterizes their music making as a larger ensemble in symphony concerts; the orchestra’s members are also strongly encouraged to collaborate in various smaller ensembles and thus often perform together in less-usual configurations. In this way certain works can be heard that otherwise are all too frequently neglected in concert life on account of their specialized orchestration. By now the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA Brass Ensemble has developed into a fixed group. Brass players from each season join forces around trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich as the “guiding spirit” to form a top-class chamber music ensemble that performs a repertoire ranging from the Renaissance to the present. For example, in the summer of 2008 the Ensemble gave concerts of works for brass and percussion that were in part conceived by their composers as “spatial music,” whether the canzoni of Giovanni Gabrieli or contemporary pieces by Sofia Gubaidulina, Alfred Schnittke, and Edison Denissov. In 2009 the festival theme of “Nature” provided the inspiration for a cleverly designed program focused on compositions of the 20th century. In 2010, following the lead of the season’s “Eros” theme, the players explored the love story of Romeo and Juliet as set to music by Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev. With the theme of “Night” for 2011 they have decided to investigate the sound world of Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky and its macabre imagery of Death personified and a Witches’ Sabbath. The LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA Brass Ensemble continually offers new commissions for these projects, such as the commission this year for Steven Verhaert’s arrangement of the Songs and Dances of Death.
April 2011
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