In the Streets: City Stage

Sometimes all it takes is simply clapping your hands to create complex yet deeply grooving rhythms. In keeping with the Festival theme “American Dreams,” a percussion quartet from the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) presents four works by Steve Reich, including his iconic Clapping Music and Drumming. One of the masterminds of American Minimalism, Reich sets simple motifs and rhythms in continuous loops, gradually shifting them against one another to create intricate polyrhythmic patterns with a mesmerizing flow.
 

By request! The Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) moves from the KKL into Lucerne’s Old Town and transforms into a live jukebox. You help decide what gets played. The repertoire prepared for these four interactive concerts ranges from Vivaldi and Beethoven to Smetana’s Vltava and Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. And, in keeping with the Festival theme, it also includes music by Gershwin, Bernstein, and John Adams. Conductor Joseph Sieber serves as host, guiding you through the program.
 

Is that a hot-air balloon that has landed here? For two days, an unusual yellow object stands in Lucerne, serving as both a pop-up installation and a miniature concert hall. Nothing fixed, but rather a playful intervention in everyday urban life. Inspired by the legendary Dream House, a potentially infinite light-and-sound installation by the American Minimalist La Monte Young and his wife Marian Zazeela, musicians of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) fill this temporary space with the seemingly endless sustained tones of Young’s groundbreaking Trio for Strings. Step inside and listen to this ethereal, hypnotic music unfolding in slow motion.
 

“Ms New Orleans,” “Lady Louis,” “Queen Clarinet”: these are just some of Doreen Ketchens’s nicknames. In Lucerne, the American clarinetist joins young musicians of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO). Through workshops and shared performances, they immerse themselves in New Orleans’s rich musical heritage to develop a program over the course of a week – a “work in progress” shaped by exchange between the Old and New Worlds. It explores improvisation, the interplay of playing and marching, and the street as an urban space where people, musical traditions, and history intersect. Composer and percussionist Jessie Cox and pianist-composer Simone Keller bring additional perspectives and experience as Swiss artists. The result is not a folkloristic homage to a bygone America, but a multi-voiced, at times contradictory “American Dream.”
 

Let’s experience the world through our ears. Together with musicians of the Lucerne Festival Academy, sound artist Andres Bosshard develops a sound walk around Lucerne’s Musegg Wall with its nine towers. He calls his approach “active urban sound gardening,” encouraging us to listen closely: how many pockets of quiet can be found in Lucerne? How does the noise of the highway cuttings blend with the flow of the postglacial Reuss River? What does it sound like when a helicopter suddenly appears, casting its reverberation tails against the tower walls? We learn to engage with our everyday surroundings through listening and, through our own actions, to shape a new urban sound.
 

Turning brass into gold: five young trumpeters from Great Britain, Sweden, and Ukraine know the formula that countless alchemists have sought in vain. Founded four years ago at London’s Royal Academy of Music, FiveBy5 produces a radiant, golden brass sound with a brilliant sheen and has already won numerous prizes. Most recently, the quintet won the prestigious Philip Jones International Brass Ensemble Competition in 2025. This success has, among other things, led to their appearance at “In the Streets: City Stage”: the varied program ranges from Bach, Rameau, and Mozart to the rousing Hoe-Down from Aaron Copland’s cowboy ballet Rodeo.

New Orleans is widely regarded as the birthplace of jazz. In the late 19th century, numerous brass bands sprang up all over the city. With trumpets and trombones, clarinets, saxophones, sousaphones, and banjos, they marched as “second line” ensembles in parades and funerals, shaping the city’s sound – a distinctive blend of musical styles that combines European marches with African rhythms. The Swiss quintet Dixie-Ramblers, which has performed in New Orleans and aboard the legendary Mississippi paddle steamer Natchez, brings this fascinating cultural melting pot to Lucerne. It performs concerts on Kapellplatz and Weinmarkt and also makes its way through the Old Town streets as a marching band.