LUCERNE AND PRESS

 NEW YORK TIMES
August 22th 2004

NOTEBOOK

A Swiss Refuge From Hysteria in an Alpine Setting

By HARVEY SACHS

LUCERNE, Switzerland, Aug. 21 - Lucerne, with its ancient center, Alpine surroundings and picturesque river and lake, is often described as the most beautiful town in Switzerland.

The Swiss will warn you, however, that the town's weather leaves much to be desired.

Sure enough, downpours have been frequent through the first nine days of the Lucerne Festival. But during concert intermissions the ingeniously cantilevered roof, which projects from the Jean Nouvel-designed Culture and Convention Center over the adjoining plaza, allows audience members to enjoy a splendid view of the lake and the town without getting drenched.

This protected feeling has been a feature of the festival since its inception in 1938, when it was a refuge for musicians who could not or would not return to the Salzburg Festival in neighboring Austria after the Nazi takeover there. To this day, Lucerne provides a peaceful spot for musicians of divergent backgrounds and viewpoints who wish to be heard with equanimity.

Cynics say the absence of an opera house automatically ensures a lower level of hysteria here than at other major European festival locations. In any case, Lucerne's festival is unquestionably one of the most stimulating of its kind, and the culture center's concert hall, inaugurated in 1998, boasts acoustics (developed by Russell Johnson) that are among the world's finest.

In recent years the prospectus for each Lucerne summer has been emblazoned with a one-word theme. One year it was "Self," another, "Seduction"; this year, it's "Freedom." These catchwords can easily become catchalls, but the concert on Friday by the Cleveland Orchestra and its current music director, Franz Welser-Möst, stuck fairly close to the subject.

William Tell, who may or may not have existed, is the symbol of Swiss resistance to Austrian invaders, so Rossini's "William Tell" Overture seemed a pointed if somewhat obvious choice to start the evening. But there was also a more important musical connection: the concert, which included a fine performance of Haydn's "Military" Symphony, ended with Shostakovich's Symphony No. 15, and that work's first movement includes repeated quotations from the final section of Rossini's overture.

Although the alternation of grim divertimento with poignant elegy found in so much of Shostakovich's music characterizes this symphony as well, the overt elements of caricature present in his earlier works are not to be heard here, and the grimness and poignancy have ceased to be ironic. There are musical quotations in the finale, too, but Rossini's rip-roaring "William Tell" theme has been replaced by the dire introduction to Siegfried's Funeral Music from Wagner's "Götterdämmerung." The symphony, Shostakovich's last, dates from 1971, five years before his death, and one may reasonably speculate that for this man the idea of freedom - or liberation, at any rate - had become inextricably bound up with a longing for oblivion.

In Lucerne this summer the Cleveland Orchestra is the only non-European ensemble among the six orchestras in residence. The Cleveland residency inaugurates a project (sponsored by the Roche pharmaceutical company) that connects the orchestra not only to the Lucerne Festival but also to Carnegie Hall: each year the orchestra is to present the premiere of a work by a respected contemporary composer and then perform it at Carnegie.

The new piece this year - "Night's Black Bird," by the English composer Harrison Birtwistle - was performed on Saturday. In some ways it is a prologue to Sir Harrison's "Shadow of the Night," given its premiere by the orchestra in 2001, and the two pieces were presented here in tandem.

They are musically interrelated: a rhythm played by the high-hat (percussion) appears early on in both, and a single, piercing trumpet note accompanied by a very soft string chord and followed by a quiet percussion denouement ends each piece. But "Night's Black Bird" is shorter and, on the whole, more easily graspable than its chronological predecessor.

Given the work's title, no one will be surprised that it unfolds in an overwhelmingly dark atmosphere. Occasional hints of birdcall bring to mind the early influence on Sir Harrison of Messiaen, probably the greatest avian enthusiast among composers.

Yet Sir Harrison's linguistic complexity seems a throwback not to Messiaen but to the Darmstadt School of the 1950's and 60's, the mere mention of which can still cause convulsions among born-again tonal musicians. "Night's Black Bird" will have to be heard several times to be assimilated; its composer must hope that other orchestras will be able to match not only the Cleveland's virtuosity but also its seriousness.

The Birtwistle pieces are not among the works connected to the Freedom theme. Some of those that do appear on the list make one wonder why they're there. In the second act of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," for instance, the title characters long not for free will but, on the contrary, for eternal submission to the love potion that they have inadvertently consumed. The entire act, in a semistaged version, was the culmination of the festival's opening concert, on Aug. 13, with the year-old Lucerne Festival Orchestra conducted by its founder, Claudio Abbado.

Since the British tenor John Treleaven, flown in at the last moment to replace an ailing colleague, had to cope with the terrifying role of Tristan under impossible circumstances, and since the German bass René Pape is already known as one of the great King Markes of our time, attention was focused primarily on the evening's Isolde, Violeta Urmana, a Lithuanian mezzo-soprano who is making her way into the soprano repertory. If she continues to sing with the power, subtlety and conviction she displayed here, she stands to become one of the great Isoldes of our time.

The concert had begun with Richard Strauss's "Four Last Songs," a valedictory work, like the Shostakovich symphony, but more reasonably interpreted as an acceptance of death than as a longing for it. This performance might well have sunk under the weight of its tempos had the soprano Renée Fleming not given yet another demonstration of her extraordinary technical control and steadiness. I heard complaints about lack of intensity, but Ms. Fleming seemed to me to allow the work's emotion to emerge in all its autumnal radiance precisely by not overloading it with emphasis.

About a third of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra's members come from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, another Abbado project; others are world-renowned soloists or chamber players, including the cellist Natalia Gutman, the clarinetist Sabine Meyer and members of the Hagen and Berg string quartets. The ensemble's second and final program was presented twice, and by the second outing, on Thursday, the playing, which was brilliant from the start, had gained in subtlety, evident in both Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, with Maurizio Pollini as soloist, and Mahler's Fifth Symphony.

Summer festivals can easily turn into the musical equivalent of an ice-cream cone - something enjoyable but unmemorable - but Michael Haefliger, who has been in charge of the Lucerne operation since 1999, opposes such tendencies. He makes sure that the repertory includes not only the tried and true but also works on which the printer's ink has not yet dried, and that first-rate orchestras, conductors, chamber ensembles and soloists present all performances.

Having worked hard to bring the Lucerne Festival Orchestra into existence last summer, Mr. Haefliger and his colleagues have even more reason to be pleased this year. They have created the Lucerne Festival Academy - financed by various businesses, private foundations and the city and canton of Lucerne - under the artistic directorship of Pierre Boulez.

The new institution is providing 120 gifted young performers with free, top-level instruction in the techniques and interpretation of 20th- and 21st-century music. This summer Mr. Boulez and Mr. Pollini are holding master classes (many of them open to the public) for conductors and pianists, and promising young composers have been commissioned to write works for the academy orchestra.

In short, the Lucerne Festival provides a feast for music lovers, be they well-heeled tourists in search of the familiar, hard-bitten radicals who won't listen to music written before 1995 or the rest of us. It runs until Sept. 18, and the rain seems to have stopped, at least for now