Turbulent Order: The LFCO on Tour

In mid-August, during the opening weekend of last summer’s Festival, Jörg Widmann made a spectacular debut as Artistic Director of the Lucerne Festival Academy when he conducted the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO). For the occasion, he chose a work by his predecessor at the Academy, Wolfgang Rihm. An outsized poème dansé that revels in excess, Tutuguri takes its cue from a maxim by the French theater avant-gardist Antonin Artaud: “Everything must be brought into a raging order with absolute precision.” It was an overwhelming musical experience. Widmann himself was blown away: “When I looked at the musicians’ faces, I saw a mixture of joy and exhaustion – but also disbelief that we were the ones who had just unleashed all that in the hall.”

In early September, Widmann and the LFCO took Tutuguri on tour, giving performances at the Philharmonie as part of Musikfest Berlin and at Munich’s Isarphilharmonie for “musica viva.” The tour performances elicited an equally enthusiastic response. Berlin’s Tagesspiegel raved: “The sheer sonic power they unleash is astonishing, yet these young musicians from Lucerne also play with remarkable refinement and subtlety.” The Süddeutsche Zeitung called the LFCO “fabulous” and the performance “nuanced and strangely refreshing.” Munich’s Abendzeitung wrote: “Widmann paced the work’s mounting intensity with complete assurance, never letting the excess boil over. But neither did he tame its wildness.”

This photo gallery looks back on the successful short tour. And there’s more to come in just a few weeks: at Lucerne Festival Forward (20–22 November), Jörg Widmann and the LFCO will explore Robert Schumann’s music and how it echoes into the present through works by Heinz Holliger, Christian Jost, György Kurtág, Aribert Reimann, and Widmann himself.