Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO)

With the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO for short), which was launched in 2021, Lucerne Festival has established an orchestra of excellence for new and cutting-edge music. A counterpart to the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, it focuses on 20th- and 21st-century scores, from modern classics to commissioned works premiered in Lucerne. In 2021, for example, it gave the first performance of Rebecca Saunders’s Piano Concerto to an utterance, which was followed by Thomas Ades’s Air (featuring Anne-Sophie Mutter) in the summer of 2022. The members of the LFCO have all benefited from training at the Lucerne Festival Academy, which was initiated by Pierre Boulez and is now directed by Wolfgang Rihm. Thanks to its close ties to the Academy and its network, the LFCO is able to play a pioneering role in the performance of contemporary music and the development of forward-looking concert formats. It exploits the possibilities of new technologies through its projects; interdisciplinary work gives rise to innovative listening and concert events. The LFCO can be experienced at the Lucerne Summer Festival, and each November the musicians also organize their own festival dedicated to contemporary music: Lucerne Festival Forward. The LFCO has recently been invited to the “Visions” Festival at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Musikfest Berlin, and the Donaueschinger Musiktage. The LFCO has worked with Sylvain Cambreling, Kirill Gerstein, Heinz Holliger, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Enno Poppe, and Tyshawn Sorey, among others, and has participated in productions by the Luzerner Theater.

May 2023