When conductor Claudio Abbado and executive director Michael Haefliger founded the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA in 2003, they created an élite orchestra without peer in the world today. Every summer internationally renowned soloists, chamber musicians, and music professors join musicians from the ranks of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra to form an orchestra in a class by itself. Many of the musicians spend their vacations here to rehearse and experience afresh a symphonic repertoire free from workaday regimentation and routine. Their leitmotif is the idea of friendship, freedom, and a joy in making music together. Abbado inspires his "orchestral family" to supreme achievements by imparting the mentality common to chamber music: opening up, listening to each other, mutually experiencing the way that sound, interpretation, even music itself emerges. In the six years of its existence, many stars of the classical music scene have played in the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA, and every year new stars join their numbers. The orchestra leaves an indelible mark on the first ten days of each festival by mounting several symphony concerts. Its members also appear in chamber recitals for unusual combinations of instruments. And at the season’s end comes the grand tour: foreign residencies have taken the musicians to Rome, Tokyo, New York, Vienna, and Beijing with performances in Madrid and Paris scheduled for 2010.

Click here for a detailed history of the orchestra.

Contact
LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA
Christiane Weber
Hirschmattstrasse 13 | CH - 6002 Lucerne
t +41 41 226 44 55 | f +41 41 226 44 60