Ensemble of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO)

With the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO), which was launched in 2021, Lucerne Festival has established an orchestra of excellence for new and contemporary music. As a counterpart to the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, it focuses on 20th- and 21st-century scores, ranging from modern classics to commissioned works that are premiered in Lucerne. The members of the LFCO have all benefited from training at the Lucerne Festival Academy, which was founded by Pierre Boulez and is now directed by Wolfgang Rihm. Thanks to its close ties to the Academy and its network, the LFCO is in a position to play a pioneering role in the performance of contemporary music and the development of forward-looking concert formats. Through its projects, it takes advantage of the possibilities of new technologies; interdisciplinary work gives rise to innovative listening and concert experiences. The LFCO can be heard at the Lucerne Summer Festival, and the musicians additionally present a festival of their own each November which is dedicated to the music of today: Lucerne Festival Forward. The LFCO has recently been invited to the Musikfest Berlin, the Donaueschinger Musiktage, and the Kölner Philharmonie; in the spring of 2023, the orchestra will perform at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. 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 at the Luzerner Theater. The musicians premiered Rebecca Saunders’s Piano Concerto to an utterance in 2021 and, together with Anne-Sophie Mutter, Thomas Adès’s Air in the summer of 2022.

Lucerne Festival debut in the summer of 2021, giving five concerts.

November 2022