The idea of a festival orchestra can look back on a long tradition in Lucerne, where the city’s summer festival was decisively shaped by the Swiss Festival Orchestra for fifty years from 1943 to 1993 and goes back even further to the summer 1938 when a special orchestra was formed for Arturo Toscanini. Claudio Abbado picked up this idea in the spring of 2000. Abbado wanted his new orchestra to be made up exclusively of musicians with whom he himself was on friendly terms, musicians who included players from the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and eminent instrumental soloists.
He particularly appreciated the almost childlike joy of playing, the feeling of camaraderie and the freshness of the collectively created sound. These recordings of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra’s 2004 capture this special spirit.
•Gustav Mahler: Fifth Symphony
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is well known to the public at large since Luchino Viscont’s film Death in Venice, since then its Adagietto has become an international hit. Following Abbado’s triumphant performance at the Lucerne Festival in Summer 2004, the ovations and shouts of bravo at the end lasted almost as long as the final movement.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4
Maurizio Pollini explores the tremendous variety of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the crystalline polish of his playing and with an emotional impetuosity that presses visibly forward. There is no element in the music that remains untapped, no material that is allowed to continue to seethe in a state of inner turmoil
