LUCERNE AND PRESS

THE TIMES
August 14th 2006

Opening Concert

Richard Morrison at the Lucerne Festival

One wonder of the modern musical world is how Lucerne, a city of just 60,000 inhabitants, managed to hire one of the world’s trendiest architects, Jean Nouvel, build a striking lakeside concert hall with the sort of sublime acoustics that audiences in London can only dream of, and relaunch its venerable summer classical-music jamboree as an intoxicating five-week mixture of international stars and cutting-edge adventure.

Does the Lucerne Festival (which runs until September 17) now outclass our own Proms? It is creeping close. It boasts 90 concerts, 16 premieres and seven resident orchestras, including the Vienna Phil, the Concertgebouw and three of America’s finest ensembles. It also includes a unique three-week academy in which 100 talented young musicians intensively study contemporary music under Pierre Boulez’s peerless tutelage. And, of course, the whole event is played out in front of a breathtaking Alpine backcloth. Somehow, Kensington Gardens doesn’t quite measure up.

But what has attracted most attention has been the rebirth of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra as a once-a-year amalgam of top-notch principal players and brilliant younger talent drawn from Daniel Harding’s Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Its magnificent sonority, particularly in the strings, was again in evidence at this year’s opening concert, in which Claudio Abbado conducted a spellbinding performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. In recent years Abbado’s physical frailty has added an extra-musical poignancy to every performance he directs.

And in this symphony — where Mahler stares so unflinchingly into the black void of his own extinction, and depicts life’s ebbing joys with such autumnal anguish — the Italian maestro’s almost spectral approach moved me close to tears.

Abbado has always been masterly at delineating Mahler’s complex webs of counterpoint. But here he conjured an orchestral sound of unremitting darkness, then whittled away the textures so radically that the music itself seemed to cling to existence by a thread. This was an intensely private man delving deep into his own shadowed psyche. No wonder that, after the finale’s titanic death throes, a full minute elapsed before anyone dared to applaud.

Earlier, what a contrast! Cecilia Bartoli, all smiles, sparkle and hyperactive eyebrows, bubbled through four Mozart arias. She even turned Exsultate Jubilate into an enchanting seduction scene. Meanwhile Abbado, mindful of his soloist’s smallish voice, coaxed miracles of delicacy from the orchestra — of which Sabine Meyer’s basset-clarinet solo in Parto, parto was the jewel in the crown. Those seven visiting orchestras will have their work cut out to match this standard in the coming weeks.

www.lucernefestival.ch