Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO)

Through the establishment of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) in 2021, Lucerne Festival has its own outstanding ensemble for new and contemporary music. As a counterpart to the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, it focuses on compositions from the 20th and 21st centuries, ranging from modern classics to world premieres. It has given the first performances of such works as Beat Furrer’s Lichtung, Rebecca Saunders’s to an utterance, and Thomas Adès’s Air (featuring soloist Anne-Sophie Mutter). All of the members of the LFCO have benefited from their training at the Lucerne Festival Academy, which was founded by Pierre Boulez and later led by Wolfgang Rihm and, since 2026, by Jörg Widmann. The LFCO plays a pioneering role in the performance and interpretation of contemporary music and the development of forward-looking concert formats not least by incorporating new technologies and interdisciplinary approaches. It performs at Lucerne’s Summer Festival and at Lucerne Festival Forward in November, the ensemble’s own festival dedicated to contemporary music. The LFCO has toured to the “Visions” Festival at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. In September it will appear at Musikfest Berlin and at Munich’s Gasteig. The LFCO has collaborated with such artists as Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Sir George Benjamin, Sylvain Cambreling, Heinz Holliger, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Susanna Mälkki, Jonathan Nott, Enno Poppe, David Robertson, and Tabea Zimmermann and has taken part in productions at the Luzerner Theater.

The Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) performed here for the first time in the summer of 2021. 

May 2026