Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO)

Founded in 2021, the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) is Lucerne Festival’s elite orchestra for new and recent contemporary music. As a counterpart to the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, it focuses on scores from the 20th and 21stcenturies, ranging from modern classics to world premieres. The LFCO has given the world premieres of works including Beat Furrer’s Lichtung, Rebecca Saunders’s to an utterance, and Thomas Adès’s Air, the latter with Anne-Sophie Mutter. All members of the LFCO have benefited from training at the Lucerne Festival Academy, which was initiated by Pierre Boulez, subsequently led by Wolfgang Rihm, and, since 2026, by Jörg Widmann. This equips the LFCO to play a pioneering role in the interpretation of contemporary music and the development of forward-looking concert formats, not least through the use of new technologies and interdisciplinary approaches. The LFCO appears at Lucerne Festival’s Summer Festival as well as at Lucerne Festival Forward, its own festival devoted to contemporary music, held each November. Invitations have taken the orchestra to the Elbphilharmonie’s “Visions” festival in Hamburg, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. In September 2026, it appeared at Musikfest Berlin and in Munich. The LFCO has worked with Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Sir George Benjamin, Sylvain Cambreling, Heinz Holliger, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Susanna Mälkki, Jonathan Nott, David Robertson, and Tabea Zimmermann, among others, and has participated in productions of the Luzerner Theater.

The Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) first appeared here in the summer of 2021; most recently, it gave several concerts during the 2026 Summer Festival, conducted by Jörg Widmann, Baldur Brönnimann, and Peter Rundel, among others.

September 2026