The Easter Festival in Lucerne, in the German-speaking region of Switzerland, started in the 15th century and ran annually for hundreds of years. In the 19th century, as Richard Wagner was living nearby, composing his opera Die Meistersinger, he proposed a summer music festival on the idyllic banks of Lake Lucerne — a dream that eventually came to fruition in the 1930s.
Expensive, glamorous and very international, today’s Lucerne Festival presents three distinct events each year, in spring, summer and fall, in a deluxe concert hall overhanging the lake. With big classical stars, major commissions and top orchestras on tour — the festival boasts one of the most impressive lineups on the calendar.
One of its in-house ensembles, the Festival Strings Lucerne, was founded in the 1950s, tours widely between performances at home and made a stop Thursday evening on Emory University’s Candler Concert Series.
Led by Daniel Dodds, an Australian-Chinese violinist, it offered a pleasingly broad program, beautifully played throughout and with uncommonly high spirits and high esprit de corps. The warm and pin-point acoustics of the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, with a strong bass response, helped this small chamber orchestra make a mighty sound.
As is typical with a European orchestra, the pre-performance rituals were kept to a minimum: The entire ensemble had tuned up their instruments backstage, then entered all together to applause, sat down and launched into the first piece.
They opened with “Pastorale d’été” by Swiss-Parisian composer Arthur Honegger, music from the early 1920s that’s neoclassical and meditative: We’re out in verdant nature, with bird calls all around and the rustling sounds of wind and leaves and perhaps our own senses. Lovely solos for horn and, in turn, the woodwinds, evoke the eternal present of shepherds and their flock. The music builds and speeds up in the middle section, but this isn’t a journey. We’re not trying to get anywhere. Their playing was light and fragrant — just right.
A member of the orchestra, bassist Richard Dubugnon, composed his Caprice IV for chamber orchestra, in 2017, based on marginalia from a Beethoven score. The emotionally turbulent, stone-deaf composer, on the manuscript of his last string quartet (his Op. 135), scribbled a question: “Muss es sein?” — “Must it be?” — followed by the answer: “Es muss sein!” — “It must be!”
What does it mean? No one knows for sure, but composers since Beethoven’s death have taken this cryptic statement as an artist’s assuredness that one’s own muse, one’s own instincts, are correct. Am I doing the right thing? Hell yes! (Leader Dodds, microphone in hand, explained this back story to the audience. When he asked the question in German, the entire ensemble shouted back the answer. It was startling to hear a full orchestra speak, one of the performance’s many charming moments.)
Beethoven’s mystery statements are each attached to a tiny theme, and it’s these themes — almost an inhale and an exhale — that drive Dubugnon’s 13-minute Caprice, which taps colorful and friendly modernist styles. The full ensemble had a lot to do throughout, with a prominent role for the clarinet. It was fun to hear and evidently fun to play: I saw a few of the musicians enthusiastically bobbing their heads to the beat as they counted measures, waiting for their next entrance. They were into it.
Near the end, the double bass gets the most technically treacherous solo of all, moving into risky upper registers that require absolutely perfect intonation, lest it sound queasy. Dubugnon nailed it, of course. He’s as virtuosic a player as he is a composer, and the piece will have me seeking out more of his music.
The Lucerne band brought along star violinist Midori for two works, on either side of intermission.
The first was a rare performance of Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto. Even in this precise, affectionate reading, it reminded us why the composer’s widow, Clara, and his best friend, Johannes Brahms, decided to lock up the concerto’s score, unplayed, until the centennial of his death — which would have been 1958. As the program notes eloquently put it, “Schumann’s last orchestral work was a violin concerto, which he wrote while increasingly afflicted by mental illness,” adding that the concerto was “dismissed by some as the work of a madman” and that Clara wanted to protect her husband’s reputation from “criticisms and misjudgments.”
It’s fascinating, but unpredictable, how creativity and the human mind operate. Late in his life, the great American abstract expressionist artist Willem de Kooning, suffering profoundly from Alzheimer’s, continued painting. Many of these works exude brooding atmosphere and tension and are simply gorgeous — even as there’s almost nothing on the canvas, just ribbons of bold color and the ghostly effects of scraped off paint.
Despite the efforts of violinists as esteemed and serious as Midori, Schumann’s concerto lacks coherence and has few of the lyrical and harmonic strengths celebrated throughout the composer’s body of work. Thursday, the concerto was cleanly played but almost devoid of energy. (Daydreaming during the rambling opening movement, I’d wished the Festival Strings Lucerne had flipped the program, adding a strong short work by Schumann and, for Midori’s showpiece, a commissioned violin concerto from Dubugnon.)
After intermission, Midori returned for Beethoven’s Romance in F, Op. 50, music that might have been intended as a slow movement to a concerto he never completed. Or maybe it was intended as a sort of study, a model, for the masterpiece concerto he did complete. The Japanese-born, New York-educated violinist unspooled the romance with unfailing elegance and warmth. Her playing, intensely focused and perfectly polished, had an almost aristocratic bearing. In softer, quieter moments, her tone was pure silk. She’s been a big presence in the violin world since she was a child prodigy, and her playing keeps getting more pure and deeper.
The Lucerne musicians closed with Beethoven’s 7th Symphony in a wonderful performance, at turns intimate and ebullient. Violinist Dodds is credited as leader and artistic director (where “leader” is the British term for concertmaster), but the symphony sounded mostly self-realized, coming together as a conversation between sections, almost as chamber music. It all seemed so organic and flowed naturally, without one overarching viewpoint. A good conductor might have given it more edge, more forward thrust. But this approach was thoroughly convincing, fleet-footed and often thrilling.
When it was over, with the crowd cheering, the Festival Strings Lucerne smiled and waved to us, then turned to hug each other — the final charming element to this satisfying evening.
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Pierre Ruhe was the founding executive director and editor of ArtsATL. He’s been a critic and cultural reporter for the Washington Post, London’s Financial Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was director of artistic planning for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. He is publications director of Early Music America.