Anne-Sophie Mutter

50 years, 50 concerts: Half a century ago, in August 1976, the then 13-year-old Anne-Sophie Mutter began her career at the Lucerne International Music Festival, as Lucerne Festival was known at the time. To mark this anniversary – which is further underscored by her 50th appearance at the Festival – we are dedicating a special program focus to her. Just one year after her Lucerne debut, Mutter was already performing with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Herbert von Karajan. Since then, she has given concerts in major music centers around the world, performing not only the classical repertoire but many new works as well. She has premiered 34 scores by major composers such as Thomas Adès, Henri Dutilleux, Sofia Gubaidulina, Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki, André Previn, Wolfgang Rihm, and Jörg Widmann. In the 2026–27 season, with the Triple Concerto by the Iranian composer Golfam Khayam, she will again introduce new repertoire. In March, Alpha Classics released the first installment of a three-part CD series featuring music composed specifically for her. A key priority for Mutter is the promotion of outstanding young musicians. To this end, she founded the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation and the scholarship ensemble Mutter’s Virtuosi. In her anniversary year, she has already toured Asia with John Williams’s Second Violin Concerto and led the Berlin Baroque Soloists in ten concerts in early summer. In the spring of 2027, she will concertize with the Munich Philharmonic and Lahav Shani in both Europe and the U.S. and will perform Penderecki’s Metamorphoses with the Vienna Philharmonic. Mutter has received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, the Leipzig Mendelssohn Prize, and the Polar Music Prize, as well as four Grammy Awards. She is a recipient of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the French Legion of Honor, the Bavarian Order of Merit, and the Grand Decoration of Honor of the Republic of Austria. Since 2022, she has served on Lucerne Festival’s Board of Trustees.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 23 August 1976 in a program of works by Tartini, Bach, de Falla, Paganini, and de Sarasate; most recent appearance here was on 24 August 2025, when she joined with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko to play film music by John Williams.

June 2026