Enter the parallel universe that is the Lucerne Festival

There wasn’t going to be a Lucerne Festival this year. The annual month-long squillion-dollar international beano got cancelled, along with the rest of Europe’s musical life, round about the time that we were all starting to get bored of banana bread. Then suddenly, in late July, it was on again. The Swiss government authorised distanced and masked audiences of up to a thousand, and a series of nine concerts was rapidly improvised with locally available talent — which, when you have the determination, contacts and (crucially) bank balance of the Lucerne Festival, means people such as Cecilia Bartoli, Igor Levit and, for these opening concerts, Martha Argerich and Herbert Blomstedt, plus a scaled-down Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

The first reaction is amazement that something so like normality is happening at all. The second, of course, is raging, blood-spitting envy. They make it look so easy: Covid or no Covid, when you buy a train ticket from Zurich to Lucerne, the machine automatically offers festivalgoers a discount. Details like this simply reinforce that characteristically Swiss sensation of having stepped into a slightly too perfect parallel world: a Zardoz-like bubble, sheltered from history, where elegant, affluent people listen to Mozart while the rest of Europe stares bleakly at second waves, recession and, for all we know, Sean Connery flying around in a colossal stone head. With the sunshine on the mountains, the paddle steamers like swans on the lake, and the audience all obediently wearing their branded Festival face masks, the Lucerne Festival defies you to resist its charms.

So naturally, you just want to shove the knife in and twist it; and keep twisting until the UK’s malnourished orchestras get a share of that Patek Philippe-advert slickness, that casually worn exclusivity, and of course that lovely, lovely money.