Keeping the faith | 6 September 2012

Faith is the theme of this year’s Summer Festival in Lucerne. Not that I would have guessed it from the three concerts I went to in the Concert Hall on consecutive evenings last week. But the programme books insist on it, and there are, besides the musical events, lectures and discussions on Faith, with a cardinal and theologians participating. Why the need to justify having a festival, inflated prices for tickets, hotels, etc. being taken for granted by the majority of the well-heeled patrons? And how many of the patrons are led to reflect more intensely than they normally do on the nature of Faith, or of their faith if they have one?

The reason I ask these questions is that the festival organisation seems to believe that the performance of music is an activity in need of some justification, while I’d have thought that the point of at any rate most festivals is that the art itself is sufficient cause for celebration and reflection. That surely becomes all the more evident when one notices that many of the concerts — all the ones I attended — are given by teams who are on the way from Salzburg to the Proms, or something of the kind, with identical programmes.

The Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle gave, in Lucerne, the same concert that they presented two nights later in the Albert Hall, though the sound in the two venues must have been strikingly different. The concert began with Ligeti’s Atmosphères, a marvellous purely auditory affair, the last silence of which Rattle brilliantly extended until the orchestra breathed the opening chord of the Prelude to Lohengrin. In that context, Wagner’s first transcendental orchestral achievement became merely that, with no unearthly connotations; instead, a series of hypnotic waves of sound.