Lucerne is a city with powerful musical associations, the most celebrated being Wagner’s living there for the six years between 1866 and 1872, the most tranquil of his life, in Haus Triebschen, now a magnificent Wagner museum.
Lucerne is a city with powerful musical associations, the most celebrated being Wagner’s living there for the six years between 1866 and 1872, the most tranquil of his life, in Haus Triebschen, now a magnificent Wagner museum. But he had visited before, most notably in 1859, when he finished Tristan und Isolde in the Hotel Schweizerhof; but also in 1850, a visit recorded with surprising sympathy by Stravinsky, a late convert to Wagner, when he visited Lucerne for the last time in 1969: ‘I went from Triebschen to the Schwann Hotel for tea. Sitting there — where Wagner, not yet amnestied, followed with watch in hand the first performance of Lohengrin in Weimar — it seemed impossible that my own childhood could be so far away, and impossible that that world of feeling could be extinct, except in me.’
For any music lover with an associative turn of mind, these things are haunting. Add, if you live in the UK, the relief and incredulity of arriving for a few days in a country where things work, and the prospect of exciting musical events to attend, and you could hardly ask for more before the long Christmas cultural close-down.
There are several Lucerne music festivals, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, in a few years’ time, they are continuous round the year. The first one was started in 1938, by Toscanini and Fritz Busch, among others, as a defiant gesture against the Nazification of Salzburg, and has been held every year since, except 1940. It is most celebrated at present for the annual appearance of Claudio Abbado with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, but there are plenty of other events as well as that.
The November Piano Festival has an agreeable pattern — a debut concert at 12.15, lunchtime, and an evening concert by a distinguished pianist or an orchestral concert. The lunchtime recitals take place in St Luke’s church, a sadistically plain affair which makes the average Methodist chapel look like a rococo extravaganza. The first concert I went to there was by Jinsang Lee, a 29-year-old South Korean whom I found so impressive that I was amazed to find he has yet to record anything. The first half of his programme was devoted mainly to not terribly interesting early works of Chopin, but the second half was a riveting account of Schumann’s great Fantasy in C major, opus 17. Lee plays with great power and refinement, but above all with a mastery of the whole which eludes most pianists. He wittily played as encore Schumann’s affectionate parody of Chopin from Carnaval.
The next morning’s recital was at least as impressive: the 23-year-old Frenchman Jean-Frédéric Neuburger showing himself to be a virtuoso of the first rank, but also an interpreter of deep insight. He began with Brahms’s arrangement of Bach’s D minor Partita, for the left hand, and moved on to Liszt’s Deux Légendes, the least tinselly reading of them I have heard. Then mistakenly he not only gave us the lengthy Messiaen Le Merle de roche, but then his own 3 Songs of Maldoror, equally long and just as indigestible. However, the last item, Ravel’s own solo piano arrangement of La Valse, was not only musically satisfying, but also as staggering a display of virtuosity as I have ever heard in the flesh, not forgetting Richter, Gilels, Cherkassky. Neuburger records on the Mirare label, and is clearly destined to be one of our leading pianists.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the third debut pianist I heard, Alice Sara Ott, a 22-year-old German–Japanese with a large number of recordings on DG already in the catalogue. In the programme book she is quoted as wishing to play in darkness, so that people would concentrate purely on the music. Failing that, in St Luke’s, she appeared in a shimmering backless white evening dress, and sashayed to and from the piano. Her Beethoven playing was an impressionistic wash, her Liszt and Chopin were better but not, I felt, distinctive. The same evening Evgeny Kissin gave as an encore Chopin’s C sharp minor waltz, which Ott had played in the body of her concert, and the contrast in depth of perception, in Kissin’s favour, was cruel. His recital, which consisted of Schumann and Chopin, all the latter’s Ballades, was on the highest artistic level, intensely serious, compelling in a way that surprised me.
The evening concerts are given in the concert hall of the culture and congress centre, entering which was the nearest I have ever been to going down a mine. The hall itself is lofty, white, chilly in atmosphere but overheated. The acoustics are good. The first evening Andras Schiff gave a relentlessly didactic account of Schumann’s Sonata in F sharp minor, and his whole approach, though he relented in Mendelssohn, seemed like more of a lesson than a recital.
The next evening I heard for the first time in the flesh the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and was of course overwhelmed by the beauty of their playing. Not, however, by either Brahms’s Second Serenade, nor his Second Piano Concerto, worthily performed by Emanuel Ax with Haitink conducting. Their approach to the latter was, as it should be, chamber-musical, but too often Ax could be seen but not heard, industriously playing. But the Kissin concert was the kind of event that obliterates other musical experiences one might have had in its proximity.
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