Lucerne Festival Forward 2024
“Dona nobis pacem” – Patricia Kopatchinskaja will stage a new concert with the curatorial team of Lucerne Festival Forward focused on the topic of suffering and violence in times of war.
For the fourth edition of the Forward Festival for contemporary music from 15 to 17 November 2024, violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja will join the Contemporary Leaders of Lucerne Festival who are also curating the festival this fall. Together with Patricia Kopatchinskaja, this group of selected former participants in the Lucerne Festival Academy will bring her new concert project “Dona nobis pacem” to the KKL stage. The choir of the Ukrainian Cultural Center “Prostir” will also perform. The Ukrainian singers had to temporarily leave their country due to the Russian war of aggression and found a new artistic home in Lucerne. Another highlight of this extended weekend for New Music will be the sound installation Aluminium Forest by Katherine Balch and Ted Moore in the Peterskapelle in Lucerne’s Old City, which will also be co-designed by Lucerne residents themselves through a series of workshops preceding the opening.
For the upcoming extended weekend of Forward in November, the Contemporary Leaders have put together a total of four concerts as well as a family concert and a sound installation with accompanying workshops under the direction of Lucerne Festival’s Contemporary Director Felix Heri and Dramaturge Mark Sattler. Patricia Kopatchinskaja will perform the Violin Concerto of the American composer Michael Hersch on Saturday evening, 16 November. For her new staged concert “Dona nobis pacem” on Sunday evening, she will present music by Galina Ustvolskaja, Michael Hersch, Blaise Ubaldini, Hannah Kendall, and Samir Odeh-Tamimi, as well as a new work by the Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun and Ukrainian choral music. In addition, a tape produced by Kopatchinskaja herself at SWR Radio’s Experimental Studio in Freiburg that evokes a wartime backdrop will be deployed.
“I wanted to know what it would be like if we imagine the concert hall as a bunker in which people seek shelter together, while outside the world is coming to an end,” says Patricia Kopatchinskaja about her approach. “What it’s like when you don’t know what to expect or how long death will await you. What it’s like for those who can’t protect themselves. When the war broke out in Ukraine, we were still at the very beginning of our shock. Now we are experiencing even more wars and know even less how to deal with them. Do we perhaps sing a nursery rhyme to ourselves or say a prayer? Does music have any meaning at all when you’re fighting for your life?”
The festival begins on Friday evening in the Peterskapelle in the center of Lucerne’s Old City. Sofia Gubaidulina’s work Quattro from 1974 will be played amid the sound installation Aluminium Forest, which consists of aluminium wind chimes. The Ukrainian composer Anna Korsun uses megaphone signals to generate an apocalyptic soundscape made of chants, noises, and text fragments; it will be performed by members of choir of the Ukrainian Cultural Center “Prostir,” among others. The American composer Katherine Balch will give the Swiss premiere of Responding to the Waves on Friday evening and the European premiere of Chamber Music on Saturday in the KKL Luzern Concert Hall. A Late Night concert on Saturday at 10 p.m. will present Anthony Braxton’s Composition No. 255, which combines improvisation and notation, experimental jazz and European avant-garde, as well as Catherine Lamb’s line/shadow, whose score includes only a few verbal playing instructions: the audience can look forward to a trance-like, hypnotic listening experience. The Family Concert “Tubalirum” on Sunday morning was developed by Rachel Koblyakov, Jack Adler-McKean, and Noè Rodrigo Gisbert and traces the encounter between a tuba and a violin with the help of music by composers from Bach to Boulez, as well as two world premieres by Jonas Achermann and Christoph Johannes Pfändler, respectively.
Details about all of the concert programs can be found here
Ticket sales start on on 6 August 2024 at 12.00 noon (Swiss time). Starting then, anyone who is interested can also register for the Aluminium Forest workshops via the Tüftelwerk website.