On Tour

The Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) can be heard outside Lucerne as well. Following the performances at the Summer Festival, our orchestra of excellence devoted to performing modern and contemporary music regularly goes on tour.

In 2021, the year in which it was founded, the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) gave the German premiere of Rebecca Saunders’s to an utterance at the Musikfest in Berlin and was invited to appear at the 100th anniversary of the Donaueschinger Musiktage. In 2022, the musicians performed with Sylvain Cambreling at the Kölner Philharmonie, and they subsequently appeared at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie in February 2023 at the new “Visions” Festival – find out more in our magazine. In the fall of 2023, an LFCO ensemble under the direction of Mariano Chiacchiarini will present new works by Liza Lim and Charles Uzor at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Furthermore, the LFCO gave a guest performance at the Mizmorim Chamber Music Festival in January 2024, where they played the opening concert of the 10th anniversary edition under the direction of Tito Ceccherini.

The Lucerne Festival Academy have likewise performed regularly on tour in the past. Guest appearances in recent years have taken the young musicians to such European destinations as Amsterdam, London, Milan, Paris, Turin, Essen, Cologne, and Munich; to the Philharmonie in Berlin and the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie; and to New York City and Mito, Japan. Together with Pierre Boulez, the soprano Barbara Hannigan, and members of the Ensemble intercontemporain, selected Academy members undertook a European tour in the fall of 2011 performing Boulez’s Pli selon pli. In 2018, the Orchestra of the Lucerne Festival Academy presented their interpretation of Stockhausen’s Inori in Paris and Berlin under the direction of Peter Eötvös and performed works by Bella, Eötvös, Kurtág, and Zimmermann at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.