Lucerne Festival Orchestra

The Lucerne Festival Orchestra is an ad hoc seasonal orchestra, based at the annual Lucerne Festival in Switzerland. The Lucerne Festival had featured a resident orchestra as far back as 1938, with Arturo Toscanini conducting the first concert of that ensemble. From 1943 until its disbandment in 1993, the festival orchestra consisted primarily of musicians from Switzerland. A few years later, a reconstituted festival orchestra arose, based around players from the Gustav Mahler-Jugend Orchester and the European Community Youth Orchestra (now the European Union Youth Orchestra).

The most recent incarnation of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra occurred at the instigation of the late Claudio Abbado (1933-2014), after a 2000 conversation with Lucerne Festival artistic director Michael Haefliger. The core of the ensemble is the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. The LFO features some soloists and orchestral principals from major orchestras in its ranks, including Kolja Blacher, Wolfram Christ, Mirijam Contzen, Diemut Poppen, Natalia Gutman, Jens-Peter Maintz, Jacques Zoon, Reinhold Friedrich, Stefan Dohr, Alessio Allegrini, Mark Templeton, Franz Bartolomey, Alois Posch, Emmanuel Pahud, Albrecht Mayer, Stefan Schweigert, members of the Sabine Meyer Wind Ensemble, the Alban Berg Quartet and Hagen Quartet. The orchestra also includes members of ensembles with whom Abbado had a connection, such as the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

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