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LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY Orchestra | Pablo Heras-Casado | Isabelle Faust

  • KKL Luzern Konzertsaal Europaplatz 1 6005 Luzern, LU Switzerland (map)

Lucerne Festival im Sommer: Sinfoniekonzert 26

Orchestra of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY Pablo Heras-Casado conductor | Isabelle Faust violin

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) The Miraculous Mandarin, Sz. 73 Concert version
Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1, Op. 35
Edgar Varèse (1883-1965) Amériques. Second version from 1927


The music of the big city is the topic of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY’s concluding concert. In his pantomime-ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, Béla Bartók portrays a nameless metropolis, letting the orchestra loose with a madly whirling, hectic, machine-like music. Edgard Varèse for his part took inspiration from the sounds and noises of the megalopolis New York for his tone poemAmériques, drawing on the sounds of the foghorns and blaring ships that he heard coming from the harbor. Using instruments that had never before appeared on the concert stage, such as the “steamboat whistle,” the “lion’s roar,” and a loudly howling siren, he immortalized this soundscape. We’ll then hear the antithesis of all this when “artiste étoile” Isabelle Faust performs Karol Szymanowski’s rhapsodic First Violin Concerto: a playful, enraptured, and ecstatic score calling for delicately refined sound, which seems to emerge from the realm of dreams.