Discover the Summer Festival

Welcome!

Have you ever played the lottery using scratch cards? You scratch off the covering that hides the numbers underneath, desperately hoping what you’ll find will win you the main prize. This image is what inspired our visual concept representing the theme of our 2024 Summer Festival, which is “Curiosity.”

The impetus for this theme comes from marking a milestone anniversary. The Lucerne Festival Academy, which Pierre Boulez founded in 2004, turns 20! This campus for contemporary music, from which around 1,500 talented musicians from all over the world have graduated, remains unique to this day. The driving force behind it is curiosity, the hunger for something new. However, this precept is not limited to modern music. The entire history of the art manifests a desire to explore uncharted territory. Considered from an even broader perspective, curiosity is the basic prerequisite for learning and human development, from earliest childhood to old age.

Which is why we will have a special focus on education. We want to encourage you to get to know more, to arouse your curiosity about music. As always, you can look forward to enjoying moving musical experiences, to seeing the classical music scene’s top stars and finest international orchestras. But we will also be giving the artists themselves more of a chance to have their say through meet-and-greets and interviews during the concerts as well as post-concert talks. Music is a human art. It creates connections and thrives on closeness and participation.

Who knows: if we were all more curious about what is unknown, different, foreign – perhaps there would be no more room for prejudice and hatred. Particularly in these less-peaceful times, the theme of “Curiosity” may therefore also be the key to a better world.

This year, we are dispensing with the keynote speech. Instead, there will be an unconventional performance by members of the Lucerne Festival Academy to kick off the celebrations of the Academy’s 20th birthday.

At many concerts, the artists themselves will greet you on the stage and tell you what to expect. Or they will follow the performance as moderators. Or there will be a short spotlight on the program before it starts in the Concert Hall. We will publish the exact dates and events in June 2024 in Day by Day and, of course, on our website.

Before selected concerts, musicians from the Lucerne Festival Academy will perform 10-minute-long pre-concerts on a small stage in the lobby of the KKL Luzern.

Do you still have questions after the concert? No problem: we’ll answer them at post-concert talks on the small stage in the KKL lobby.

20 years – 20 minutes: To celebrate the anniversary of the Lucerne Festival Academy, you can apply for a 20-minute house concert featuring soloists of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO).

What actually happens at 7 in the morning during the Festival at the KKL Luzern? What happens backstage after the concert?
And what happens at 3 pm? We are offering three backstage specials for a limited number of participants. We will publish the dates on our website in May 2024. You can also register here.

We have further expanded our range of concert introductions. Susanne Stähr, Mark Sattler, and Malte Lohmann look forward to your visit at many of the summer programs that they will introduce in the KKL Luzern Auditorium one hour before the concert begins.