The Lucerne Festival Orchestra tours to Paris and Hamburg
On 18 October, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra will perform together with Music Director Riccardo Chailly and violinist Daniel Lozakovich at the Philharmonie in Paris, followed by the orchestra’s debut at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg on 19 October.
Following a five-year hiatus from touring, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and its Music Director Riccardo Chailly will once again be performing abroad this fall. The soloist for the concerts on 18 October in Paris and 19 October in Hamburg will be the Swedish violinist Daniel Lozakovich, who made his Lucerne Festival debut last March at the Spring Festival in Lucerne. The orchestra will begin the tour by performing at the Philharmonie Paris, followed the next day by its debut at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. The orchestra last appeared in both cities in 2015 under the direction of Andris Nelsons and performed in Hamburg’s Laeizhalle in 2012 with Claudio Abbado as part of his final tour with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.
In both concerts, Daniel Lozakovich will be the soloist in Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto; Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, which is also part of the program of the upcoming Summer Festival concert on 20 August in Lucerne, will be performed on the second half of each concert as well. On 16 August, the orchestra will launch the Summer Festival with Gustav Mahler’s Seventh Symphony.
With the founding of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which was introduced to the public for the first time in August 2003, the conductor Claudio Abbado and Festival Executive and Artistic Director Michael Haefliger established a link with the birth of Lucerne Festival in 1938. It was then that Arturo Toscanini assembled celebrated virtuosos of the time to form a unique elite orchestra, which he led in a legendary “Concert de Gala.” Riccardo Chailly has been at the helm of the orchestra since 2016. Since 2022, the orchestra has been performing not only in the summer but as part of the Spring Festival in Lucerne as well. Outside the Festival season, the members of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra perform as renowned soloists, principals, and/or music teachers or as members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Filarmonica della Scala. Claudio Abbado was the orchestra’s Artistic Director until his death in January 2014.