Master school and laboratory for the future rolled into one: The Lucerne Festival Academy provides highly talented young musicians from all corners of the globe with the tools they need to interpret the music of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Our Divisions
Symphony
World class, day in and out: Lucerne Festival hosts the finest international symphony orchestras. They join with acclaimed classical music stars and perform the great symphonic repertoire. At no other festival in the world do so many top international orchestras perform within such a short span of time.
-
In summer 2024 the following will appear:
- Berliner Philharmoniker and Kirill Petrenko
- Budapest Festival Orchestra and Iván Fischer
- Chineke! Orchestra and Leslie Suganandarajah
- Dresdner Festspielorchester, Concerto Köln and Kent Nagano
- European Union Youth Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda
- Festival Strings Lucerne and Daniel Dodds
- Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and Andris Nelsons
- Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) with Sir George Benjamin, Beat Furrer and Ruth Reinhardt
- Lucerne Festival Orchestra with Riccardo Chailly, Klaus Mäkelä and Yannick Nézet-Séguin
- Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and Michael Sanderling
- Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Antonello Manacorda
- Munich Philharmonic and Lahav Shani
- NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and Alan Gilbert
- Orchestre de Paris and Klaus Mäkelä
- Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Lahav Shani
- Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Myung-Whun Chung
- Staatskapelle Berlin and Susanna Mälkki
- Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle
- The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst
- Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and Paavo Järvi
- Czech Philharmonic and Jakub Hrůša
- West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and Daniel Barenboim
- Vienna Philharmonic and Christian Thielemann
- Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine and Oksana Lyniv
Contemporary
The "Contemporary" category promotes the music of our time and offers exciting musical adventures. For we love new sounds and are setting standards for the interpretation of contemporary music with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) and the Lucerne Festival Academy.
composer-in-residence
Every year, one or two composers-in-residence are an important part of the Summer Festival program. A variety of concerts showcase their work. In recent years, these featured composers have included Thomas Adès, Rebecca Saunders, Michel van der Aa, Unsuk Chin, Chaya Czernowin, Fritz Hauser, Thomas Kessler, Tod Machover, Olga Neuwirth, Enno Poppe, Johannes Maria Staud, and Jürg Wyttenbach. The composers-in-residence for 2024 are Beat Furrer and Lisa Streich.
World premieres 2024
New works by Jose Luis Valdivia Arias, Christoph Baumgarten, Sebastian Black, Che Buford, Tom Coult, Coral Douglas, Beat Furrer, Madli Marje Gildemann Sink, Yixuan Hu, Kristín Þóra Haraldsdóttir, Hyeokjae Kim, Eden Lonsdale, Andrew Norman, Kenta Onoda, Evgeni Orkin, Ingrid Saldana, Enjott Schneider, Noh SeungJu, Lisa Streich, Raimonda Žiūkaitė and Tianyu Zou
Music for Future
Music for Future is committed to the generation of tomorrow on the stage.
The Debut concert series concert series gives up-and-coming stars of the industry a platform to present their virtuoso skills and interpretive artistry to an international audience. Seven to eight lunchtime concerts are held each summer as part of this series. Music for Future will additionally give attention to the pre-professional level: starting in 2021, the Summer Festivals feature performances by international youth orchestras that show how young and fresh classical music can sound.
As part of Music for Future, Lucerne Festival awards three important sponsorship prizes:
Music For Future is also committed to the audience of tomorrow.
Music for Future seeks to have a double strategic impact, insofar as this commitment also applies to the audience of tomorrow, to children and young people who are given ways to make a connection with classical and contemporary music. The goal is to awaken a sense of pleasure and joy in attending concerts and to make these encounters possible.
This is accomplished through family and children's concerts, which are tailored to different age groups and offer an introduction to the world of “classical music.” The family and children’s concerts last about 45 to 60 minutes and feature topics that are delivered in entertaining, funny, or exciting ways.
Our Divisions