The thrilling Beethoven odyssey that the Lucerne Festival Orchestra first embarked on two years ago now enters its third chapter — this time with the great Sinfonia eroica, showing the composer at his most defiant and most heroic. Beethoven fought for ideals such as freedom and equality; he was convinced that humankind was destined for a better future — and that promise rings out in the exuberant finale of his Symphony in E-flat major. Franz Welser-Möst leads this performance, following his spectacular debut at the helm of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in 2025 with Beethoven’s Ninth, which the Neue Zürcher Zeitung praised as “a reading of rare clarity and finely judged balance.” The evening will meanwhile open with music by Beethoven’s great idol: Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, the hero of his youth. The Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, who is at home in Mozart’s world like few others, will perform the D minor Piano Concerto, a work that anticipates the Romantics and that he considers revolutionary. Andsnes says that for him it calls to mind “a drama between the individual — the soloist — and society, which is represented by the orchestra.”
