There are many different music festivals in Europe during the summer. Lovers of classical and rock music will find their holiday in the midst of the tourist season. Switzerland has a particularly busy festival program, and the Lucerne Music Festival stands out among the events. It is one of the most reputable and respected forums for academic music.
The festival takes place in a picturesque location above Lake Lucerne since mid-August and lasts more than a month. Here Wagner was engaged in creativity, and again music fills the city with its sound. The concert hall of the festival has 1800 seats, the structure itself is very beautiful. The glass reflects the clear waters of the lake, and the building seems to be an extension of them. This masterpiece was created by architect Jean Nouvel and acoustician Russell Johnson.
The festival program is very extensive, it consists of more than a hundred concerts and other events. Every year Lucerne hosts the best ensembles of the world, obligatory participants are the orchestras of the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic. Among the conductors you will find renowned Riccardo Chaili, Simon Rettle, Franz Welser-Most, Claudio Abbado, Valery Georgiev and other talented musicians.
All major trends in contemporary orchestral music are presented at the Lucerne Festival. World premieres are played here, some composers write their works especially for this event. Every year a new theme is chosen for the festival.
Symphonic concerts of leading figures of the world music scene replace the programs "Debut-Lucerne" for beginners, "Lucerne-modern" - the interpretation of contemporary music, "Children's Corner" - performances of talented young virtuosos. A separate line of the festival is performances by ethnographic and folklore groups.
In 2012, the Lucerne Festival will run from August 8 to September 15. The topic of this forum is Music and Faith. Invited modernist theologian and Catholic priest Hans Küng, Cardinal Kurt Koch. This year's program includes sacred music by Schubert, Bach, Bruckner, Verdi's Requiem, the opera Moses and Aaron, Symphony of Psalms by Stravinsky, The Reformation by Mendelssohn and other works related to spirituality and human faith.
The festival opens with a truly fantastic spectacle - night fireworks over the surface of the lake. The best pyrotechnics come up with a fireworks program. If you are interested in this event, you need to get to Switzerland. But it is better to do this in advance, as more than 110 thousand tourists visit the festival every year. The hotel needs to be booked in the spring, and the visa should also be taken care of in advance.
It's even better if you find a travel agency that organizes trips to the sites of the most significant festivals, so as not to worry about the places in the hotel. If you decide to go to Switzerland on your own, then you can get to Lucerne from Zurich, direct trains run every half hour. You will spend 45-50 minutes on the road. There are options with a change in Zug, but it's better to choose a simple route so as not to get lost in a foreign country.
