LFCO at Musikfest Berlin
The Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) was founded in summer 2021 as an orchestra of excellence for new music and as a counterpart to the already established Lucerne Festival Orchestra.
Just a few days after the inaugural concerts in Lucerne, the LFCO went on its first tour: on 9 September, the orchestra made a guest appearance at the Musikfest Berlin and performed at the Berlin Philharmonie under the direction of Enno Poppe.
The programme included works by Rebecca Saunders, composer-in-residence of Lucerne Festival 2021.
Saunders is a tireless researcher into sounds. She prefers to focus on individual instruments and works intensive with her performers. This is how “inspiring sessions of sonic exploration” with the percussionists Christian Dierstein and Dirk Rothbrust resulted in void. The British composer, who lives in Berlin, similarly explores unusual playing techniques in her new piano concerto to an utterance, written for pianist Nicolas Hodges as part of the “Roche Commissions”. “The solo piano within this concerto was conceived as a disembodied voice. It seeks to tell its own story… an incessant, compulsive soliloquy… on the precipice of non-being…”
Saunders’s music was juxtaposed with that of two modern icons regarded by many as polar opposites: Igor Stravinsky, with his unleashed rhythms and archaizing melodies, and Anton Webern, the advocate of strict 12-tone music.
