Pulse 2026

I love to program things that go back to the Baroque or even Renaissance and all the way up to the present. To me, those three or four hundred years are just the blink of an eye. In terms of human history, it’s nothing. It’s just a very tiny part of human existence here on Earth. That’s classical music. People say it’s old, but by doing this festival, I think we will prove that it’s young and even still in its infancy. There’s so little difference and distance between you and Johann Sebastian Bach and Ligeti, for instance. They belong together. And so we’ve chosen the theme of “Time and Space.”

The pulse is an unmistakable sign of life and the foundation of music itself. Like the pulse of the human heart, the musical pulse beats evenly yet is never static. It is not mechanical but allows for interpretative freedom. It responds to our emotions and experiences, its pace ever-changing, yet it sustains equilibrium, ensuring that the lifeblood of the music reaches all its extremities.

Why this theme? Why this program? Because music is time in space, pitch and acoustic. And the theme of “Time and Space” enables us to do a little time traveling, connecting different decades, different centuries, very different personalities. There will be traces of Bach throughout the festival. Bach is the most modern composer of all time, while sometimes what’s just been written is the most Romantic. “Time and Space” simply allows us to explore music in the widest possible perspective. And to really jump between incredibly different styles. It’s a playground of ideas.

Olafur Eliasson is a great and sort of explosive personality. He will visualize my musical interpretation of the Goldberg Variations in real time. It is all very futuristic. It’s going to be that kind of beautiful colliding of ideas, of art forms, of minds. Olafur thinks incredibly musically in his work and that’s what makes our collaboration so productive.

The Goldberg Variations are pure architecture. I think the piece lends itself very well to a visual expression. The St. Pius Church in Meggen, with its thin marble, is incredibly beautiful. It’s an intimate space and I think it’s perfect for the Goldberg Variations and for this new kind of experience. It will be a very personal one, very intimate and very exciting. But as I always say: Bach is the future, and this is just one step into that future.

Thomas Adès is one of our greatest living composers and creators. I think he is going to belong in music history with figures we consider the giants of the past. When someone like Thomas Adès is sitting right next to you and sharing a pint of beer, sometimes it’s difficult to understand that.

I think that all music is contemporary music if we play it today. Bach and Beethoven can sound just as contemporary as György Ligeti, György Kurtág, and Alban Berg. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with the word “classical.” It seems to imply the distant past, something that was done way back then. It seems to imply the Greeks and the Romans. When I play a bit of Bach or Brahms, I don’t feel classical at all. I feel very contemporary. I feel very much alive.

I remember the first time I came to Lucerne – in 2019 – being amazed by the famous roof over the KKL and how it seemed to just go on and on. Was I imagining it floating in the air? I wondered how many different types of music can we fit under this umbrella-like roof. I still think about the roof as a metaphor for how much finds shelter under it.

One of the good things about Iceland is that no one really thinks about what the music is called – whether it’s classical or rock or pop or folk or indie or techno, whatever. People are cross-collaborating across different genres and different art forms. Here in the Icelandic Parliament, we actually had a choir – I’m not sure if it still exists – where members from opposing political parties would sing together. People who were arguing all day would then come and sing side by side. … It used to be that there was no TV on Thursdays in Iceland. So the Iceland Symphony concerts were scheduled at just the right time on Thursdays. And, believe it or not, beer was prohibited in Iceland even until the late 1980s. It was a different place. … Today’s Iceland couldn’t be more modern, of course.

On the occasion of Víkingur Ólafsson’s performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the St. Pius Church in Meggen, I will create a temporary, site-specific work that dialogues with the architecture of the church and the music. My artwork explores the relations among space, light, and sound to activate the building and to extend the concert out into the world, beyond the exact time and place of its emergence.

I have long been fascinated by the potential of translating soundwaves into light to create synaesthetic experiences that transcend the boundaries of both media. The Shadows of Sounds and the Unforeseeable Shapes of Love extends these investigations with an emphasis on the effects of echoes and reverberations on our perception of time and space.