Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO)

With the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra – LFCO for short – Lucerne Festival has launched a new orchestra this year: an orchestra of excellence for the performance of new and contemporary music. The LFCO thus forms a counterpart to the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and focuses on 20th- and 21st-century scores, from modern classics to commissioned works that are premiered in Lucerne. The international members of the LFCO have all benefited from training at the Lucerne Festival Academy, which was initiated in 2003 by Pierre Boulez and is now directed by Wolfgang Rihm. Thanks to its close ties to the Academy and its network, the LFCO is able to play a pioneering role in the performance of contemporary music and in the development of forward looking concert formats. Through its projects, it exploits the possibilities of new technologies; interdisciplinary work gives rise to novel listening and concert experiences. The LFCO can be heard in numerous performances at the Lucerne Summer Festival, as well as at Lucerne Festival Forward in November – and, of course, at guest performances all over the world. In its first summer, the LFCO is collaborating with conductors Heinz Holliger, Lin Liao, Johanna Malangré, and Ilan Volkov, presenting music by composers ranging from Stravinsky and Webern to Boulez and Xenakis, as well as premieres by Amarouch, Colţea, Milenko, Vaughan, and composer-in-residence Rebecca Saunders. The musicians will join Patricia Kopatchinskaja to perform the staged concert “Bye-Bye Beethoven”. They will also participate in performances of Kagel’s “Staatstheater” at the Luzerner Theater.

As of August 2021