Spring Festival 2025
The Lucerne Festival Orchestra’s performances are not limited to the Summer Festival. Since 2022, the orchestra has been attracting classical music fans from all over the world to Lucerne during spring as well. The Spring Festival offers an extended weekend of orchestral and chamber concerts focusing on a specific composer each year; it takes place the week before Easter. The first two seasons, in 2022 and 2023, juxtaposed the five symphonies of Felix Mendelssohn with works by his major contemporaries. Last year, they began undertaking a fresh look at Ludwig van Beethoven. Among the works programmed for 2025 is Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, which Music Director Riccardo Chailly will conduct, with the young Japanese pianist Mao Fujita as the soloist.
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More about the festival: Beethoven in the original
Performing Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies is not so easy. They rank among the most frequently played works in the repertoire and have been recorded countless times. Approaching them today means grappling not only with the original score but, inevitably, with a weighty history of interpretation. Riccardo Chailly, Music Director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, has been intensively involved with Beethoven’s symphonic legacy since very early on and has thus struggled with it over a long period. “At first, I, too, followed the familiar models, but a feeling of frustration increasingly grew inside me,” he observes. Which is why Chailly eventually decided to make a radical U-turn and take Beethoven at his word. So he began performing these works exactly as they are notated in the scores. In other words, he simply stopped using the performance traditions that had developed around the symphonies over the past two centuries as his guide.
At the 2025 Spring Festival, you can experience the astonishing result with respect to two of Beethoven’s most-famous symphonies: the Pastoral and the legendary Ninth. The most striking aspect you will notice is the fast tempi. Chailly consistently uses Beethoven’s original metronome markings, which were long discredited by posterity as “wrong.” In the Pastoral, for example, as he explains: “You have to play the first and second movements almost twice as fast as is customary. The surging waters sound more turbulent than usual — which initially catches the audience off guard.” But this makes that “old acquaintance” Beethoven seem refreshingly new.
Chailly also proves that he is a savvy explorer in his choice of the two pianists he has engaged to shape the Spring Festival in 2025. The Japanese pianist Mao Fujita and the Russian pianist Alexander Malofeev were known only to insiders before Chailly introduced them to the international classical music community in recent years over the course of his Rachmaninoff cycle in Lucerne. Fujita will perform Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, which, for all its virtuosity, is really about fine nuances and a lyrical sound world. And Malofeev will give a solo recital featuring music by composers from Schubert to Scriabin, offering everything possible on the 88 keys, from deep introspection to extroverted sonic outbursts.
