Looking Ahead to Lucerne Festival in 2025
“Open End” is the theme of the 2025 Summer Festival, which will take place between 12 August and 14 September. Winnie Huang and Tabea Zimmermann are the “artistes étoiles” and Marco Stroppa is the composer-in-residence.
The Spring Festival from 11 to 13 April will feature the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with Riccardo Chailly, Mao Fujita, and Alexander Malofeev.
For the Piano Fest, which runs from 29 May to 1 June, Igor Levit has invited Iveta Apkalna, Chilly Gonzales, Malakoff Kowalski, and Johanna Summer to appear, and he himself will also perform with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.
“Open End” is Lucerne Festival’s theme in 2025, which marks the final summer edition with Michael Haefliger as Executive and Artistic Director. As such, the focus of the programming will be on works that are open-ended: works which may have been left unfinished, for example, or which are cyclical in nature. One focus will be the musical legacy of Pierre Boulez, founder of the Academy, who was born 100 years ago and who throughout his life considered composing to be a work-in-progress. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra will be led by chief conductor Riccardo Chailly, guest conductors Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and, for the first time, Sir Simon Rattle. The German violist Tabea Zimmermann and the Chinese-Australian performer and composer Winnie Huang will be featured as “artistes étoiles.” The Italian composer Marco Stroppa will take on the role of composer-in-residence, and his works will also be featured as part of the summer programming of the Lucerne Festival Academy and the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO). The conductors David Robertson, Jonathan Nott, and Elena Schwarz, among others, will work with the Academy participants; the program includes new works by Dieter Ammann, Chaya Czernowin, Dai Fujikura, Olga Neuwirth, and many others.
The world’s most sought-after soloists will once again be coming to Lake Lucerne this summer for Switzerland’s largest classical music festival: they include Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Martha Argerich, Cecilia Bartoli, Lisa Batiashvili, Isabelle Faust, Augustin Hadelich, Janine Jansen, Lang Lang, Igor Levit, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Mitsuko Uchida, and Sir András Schiff. As usual, Lucerne Festival welcomes the leading international orchestras and conductors in classical music: in addition to the Berliner Philharmoniker with Kirill Petrenko and the Vienna Philharmonic with Franz Welser-Möst, the roster includes the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra with Klaus Mäkelä, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra with Vasily Petrenko, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Daniel Barenboim, and the Orchestra and Chorus of Teatro alla Scala with Riccardo Chailly. Three celebrated French ensembles are part of the program this summer as well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, the Orchestre de Paris–Philharmonie with Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Les Arts Florissants with William Christie.
The internationally acclaimed project “The Wagner Cycles” featuring the Dresden Festival Orchestra and Concerto Köln under the direction of Kent Nagano continues with Siegfried. Les Musiciens du Prince–Monaco with Gianluca Capuano and Cecilia Bartoli will give a concert performance of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia on the KKL stage. And for the Festival's closing concert, which is also designed as a musical farewell party for Michael Haefliger, many prominent artists and ensembles will gather in the KKL Luzern Concert Hall; among them, naturally, will be ensembles from the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and the LFCO.
The numerous free formats such as 40min and 40min Open Air, the world music festival “In the Streets,” and the broadcast of the Opening Concert in Inseli Park (“Lakeside Symphony”), as well as various family and school concerts, will again be an important part of the “Open End” summer’s programming. Additional details about these formats and other contemporary concerts will be communicated at the beginning of March 2025, when the Festival program will be published.
“Ode to Joy”: The Lucerne Festival Orchestra at the Spring Festival
To begin, in April 2025 Riccardo Chailly and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra will continue the Beethoven focus of last year’s Spring Festival by performing, among other works, two of the composer’s best-loved symphonies. On the first evening of the three-day festival, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, will be performed along with the Fourth Piano Concerto, for which the soloist will be the Japanese pianist Mao Fujita. On Sunday evening, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony will be performed, with the MDR Radio Choir and the eminent soloists Regula Mühlemann, Marie-Claude Chappuis, Benjamin Bruns, and Markus Werba also appearing. Framed by the two symphony concerts, the 23-year-old Russian-Ukrainian pianist Alexander Malofeev will present a solo recital on Saturday of works bridging the gap between East and West by composers from Franz Schubert, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Leoš Janáček, and Franz Liszt to Alexander Scriabin. The Jörg G. Bucherer-Foundation is the new Main Sponsor of the Spring Festival.
Straddling Classical, Pop, and Jazz: Igor Levit’s Third Piano Fest
For the third year of his Piano Fest, which will take place the last weekend of May, Igor Levit will again bring artist friends from a wide range of backgrounds to Lucerne, transcending the boundaries between written music and improvisation and between classical music, jazz, and pop. Igor Levit himself will open the festival with a solo recital: among the works he will play is Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in the hyper-virtuosic piano version made by Franz Liszt. The piano entertainer, singer, and composer Chilly Gonzales, who will perform with violinist Yannick Hiwat on the second evening, will cross the borders separating genres. The following evening belongs to the “king of instruments,” the organ: the Latvian organist Iveta Apkalna will play works by Johann Sebastian Bach and a Minimalist composition by Philip Glass. This concert will also mark the anniversary of the KKL organ, which was donated 25 years ago by the Friends of Lucerne Festival. Another prominent crossover artist – the musician, composer, and singer Malakoff Kowalski – can be experienced later in the evening when he performs the new work Songs with Words live for the first time together with Igor Levit, Chilly Gonzales, and Johanna Summer. Igor Levit and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra will bring the Piano Fest to a classical close: in addition to Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E-flat major, K. 271 (Jenamy), the Haffner Symphony and the Serenata notturna will also be performed under the direction of concertmaster Raphael Christ.
Advance ticket sales
Online advance ticket sales for the Summer Festival begin on 18 March 2025 at 12:00 noon (Swiss time); subscriptions may already be purchased. Advance ticket sales for all Spring Festival and Piano Fest concerts will begin on 12 November 2024 at 12:00 noon (Swiss time).