★ Lucerne Festival

01Por que importa

The Lucerne Festival Orchestra is the reason this festival sits where it does in the calendar. Claudio Abbado and the festival's then director revived the idea of a hand-picked summer orchestra in 2003, borrowing the logic of the 1938 founding, and the results made Lucerne a destination for a specific kind of listener - people who travel for orchestral playing rather than staging. Riccardo Chailly succeeded Abbado in 2016. Around that core the festival draws the touring orchestras of Europe in the weeks when their own halls are shut, which means a visitor can hear four or five of the continent's major ensembles within a fortnight in one room. In our reading, Lucerne's advantage over its neighbours is the combination of the hall and the setting: a first-rank acoustic five minutes' walk from a lake steamer pier, in a town small enough that the festival is the only thing happening. It is less socially charged than Salzburg and considerably easier to get into.

02A semana ao seu redor

Lucerne is a town of about 80,000 on a lake at the foot of the Alps, and the festival is a comfortable fit rather than an occupation. The KKL sits directly beside the Bahnhof, so arrivals and departures are frictionless and a large part of the audience comes in from Zurich, Basel or Bern for the evening and goes home the same night. Concerts run in the early evening; the lakefront promenade, the Kapellbrucke and the old town on the right bank take the crowd before and after. Daytime is for the lake - the paddle steamers of the Vierwaldstattersee run to Vitznau, Weggis and Fluelen from the pier next to the hall - and for the mountain railways up Rigi and Pilatus, both under an hour away. In September the Alpine weather turns and the first snow on the high peaks is often visible from the terrace. The festival overlaps the tail of Salzburg and the whole of Edinburgh, and the touring orchestras move between them.

03Quando chegar

Two or three nights lets you hear the festival orchestra and one visiting ensemble and still spend a day on the lake or a mountain, which is the right balance. Weekends carry the heaviest programme and the strongest visiting orchestras. Arrive in the afternoon: the KKL forecourt and the lakefront in the hour before a concert are the best part of the day, and the light on the water at seven in the evening in late August is the reason to be here rather than in a city.

04Onde se hospedar

The lakefront on both banks is the obvious choice and puts you within ten minutes of the hall on foot. The Schweizerhof and the Palace on the Nationalquai are the landmarks on the right bank, with the old town behind them; the left bank around the station and the KKL is more modern and closer still. Above the town, the Burgenstock resort across the lake and the hillside hotels on the Dietschiberg trade proximity for a view and a funicular. The lakeside villages reached by steamer or by the Vitznau road - Weggis, Vitznau, Buochs - are twenty to forty minutes out and are the choice for anyone treating this as a summer stay; the last boat back after a concert is the thing to check. Zurich is an hour by train and is a perfectly reasonable base for a single concert.

05Acesso e hospitalidade

Tickets are sold by the festival through its own site and box office at the KKL, with the summer programme published and sales opening in the spring. The festival's own description of the summer is five weeks and more than a hundred concerts, which means supply is broad: the Lucerne Festival Orchestra evenings and the best-known visiting orchestras sell first, while recitals, chamber programmes, late-night concerts and the academy's contemporary events remain available close to the date. The organization runs a friends and patrons scheme with priority booking, publishes reduced pricing for young audiences, and offers free and low-cost events around the main programme. No prices are quoted here because the ticket pages were not read directly for this record.

06Onde ocorre a actividade social

The KKL's terraces and the forecourt under Nouvel's roof are where the audience gathers, with the water directly in front and the station behind; it is a public space and anyone can stand there. Intervals spill onto the lakeside walkway. Afterward the crowd crosses the Seebrucke into the old town, where the restaurants and bars around the Weinmarkt, Kornmarkt and the Rathausquai serve late, or stays on the Nationalquai terraces. The Kapellbrucke and the promenade are lit and busy until midnight in August. Nothing here requires a ticket or a table.

07Como chegar

08Aspectos práticos

09Histórico

The festival began in August 1938 with a gala concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini in the garden of Wagner's villa at Tribschen, on the lake outside the town. The circumstances mattered: Toscanini had withdrawn from Salzburg and Bayreuth in protest at fascism in Italy and Germany, and Lucerne became the neutral alternative for musicians who would not play in either. The festival ran through the war as one of the few places in Europe where an international audience could still hear an international orchestra, and it kept that character afterward, when Furtwangler, Karajan and the Philharmonia were regular visitors. It was called the Internationale Musikfestwochen until 2000. The KKL opened in 1998 and replaced the Kunsthaus as the principal venue. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra was reconstituted under Abbado in 2003; an academy for contemporary music was founded alongside it under Pierre Boulez. The Easter and Piano festivals that ran until 2019 have been replaced by the present spring, Pulse and Forward formats.

10Quem está presente

A Swiss and southern German core that travels in for single concerts, much of it by train; the international orchestral audience, drawn particularly from Germany, Britain, the United States and Japan, that follows conductors and orchestras rather than repertoire; touring musicians and the classical profession, since so many orchestras pass through in the same weeks; the festival's patrons and friends, who underwrite it; and young musicians and their families connected to the academy. Lucerne's audience is less formal and less socially self-conscious than Salzburg's.