Poème Symphonique – Lucerne Festival Pulse

Name: Poème Symphonique – Lucerne Festival Pulse
Start: 2026-05-14T18:30:00+02:00
Location: KKL Luzern, Concert hall

Schedule

Thu, 14 May, 2026 at 06:30 pm

UTC+02:00

Location

KKL Luzern, Concert hall | Lucerne, LU

Mahler Chamber Orchestra
MDR Radio Choir
Thomas Eitler-de Lint, chorus master
Thomas Adès, conductor
Víkingur Ólafsson, piano
Anna Dennis, soprano
György Ligeti: "Poème Symphonique" for 100 metronomes
Maurice Ravel: Piano Concerto in G major
György Kurtág:"… quasi una fantasia …" for piano and groups of instruments dispersed in space, Op. 27, no. 1
Arvo Pärt: "Credo" for piano, mixed choir, and orchestra
Thomas Adès: "America – A Prophecy" for soprano, large orchestra, and chorus, Op. 19. Expanded version
Three piano concertos in one evening – each connecting past and present. Maurice Ravel composed his Piano Concerto in G "in the spirit of Mozart", while also weaving in echoes of jazz and Basque folk traditions. In "Credo", Arvo Pärt takes up the famous C major Prelude from Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier", pitting avant-garde compositional techniques against tonality and triads. György Kurtág – who turned 100 in February 2026 – takes inspiration from the freely unfolding design of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, Op. 27, in his fascinating spatial composition ". . . quasi una fantasia . . .", which distributes the instruments around the audience. These three highly contrasting concertos are paired with "America – A Prophecy", a dark vision of destruction by the British composer Thomas Adès, who also takes the podium: it depicts the fall of Mayan culture at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors, with a soprano as the prophetic witness. Before all that, the concert opens with 100 ticking metronomes in György Ligeti'a "Poème Symphonique", where they come to a stop one by one, until silence prevails. When the last metronome stops, "it feels like the end of life itself", says Víkingur Ólafsson.
Photo © Priska Ketterer / Lucerne Festival