Lucerne Festival

47°02′56″N 8°18′23″E / 47.04889°N 8.30639°E / 47.04889; 8.30639

Lucerne Festival is one of the leading international festivals in the world of classical music and presents a series of classical music festivals based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Founded in 1938 by Ernest Ansermet and Walter Schulthess, it currently produces three festivals per year. Since 1999, Michael Haefliger has been its executive and artistic director. Starting in January 2026, Sebastian Nordmann will take over the directorship of Lucerne Festival.

Each festival features resident orchestras and soloists alongside guest performances from international ensembles and artists. The central festival takes place in summer from mid-August to mid-September and offers a widely varied range of approximately 100 concerts and related events primarily at the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre (KKL) designed by Jean Nouvel.

The festival started with the so-called "Concert de Gala" in the gardens of Richard Wagner's villa at Tribschen in 1938 conducted by Arturo Toscanini, who had formed an orchestra with members of different orchestras and soloists from around Europe. In the 1940s the Swiss Festival Orchestra (Schweizerische Festspielorchester) was founded from members of the elite Swiss orchestras, which became a central part of the festival known since 1943 as the Internationalen Musikfestwochen Luzern (IMF).

In 2000 the Internationale Musikfestwochen Luzern (IMF) was renamed as Lucerne Festival. Each festival features resident orchestras and soloists alongside guest performances from international ensembles and artists, in 2019 including the Berlin Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic, Bernard Haitink, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Simon Rattle. Since the 1970s the annual festivals are organized around different themes.

Since 1970 Lucerne Festival has been legally organized as a foundation. Since 1999 the executive and artistic director of Lucerne Festival has been Michael Haefliger, whose contract has been extended to 2025.

By founding the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which was introduced to the public for the first time in August 2003, the conductor Claudio Abbado and Michael Haefliger established a link to the very origins of Lucerne Festival in 1938. It was then, with a legendary "Concert de Gala," that Arturo Toscanini gathered celebrated virtuosos of the era together to form a unique elite orchestra. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra comprises internationally acclaimed principals, chamber musicians, and music teachers. With Riccardo Chailly, this orchestra once again has an Italian music director. Chailly, who became Abbado's successor in the summer of 2016, extended his contract until the end of 2026.

The Lucerne Festival Academy was founded in 2003 by Pierre Boulez and Michael Haefliger. Each summer, Academy members are joined by leading internationally renowned composers and conductors to work on contemporary scores and modern classics and to perform music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The composer Wolfgang Rihm has been the artistic director of the Academy since 2016 and his contract has been extended until 2025. In 2021 the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) as a new festival orchestra devoted to contemporary music was founded to bring together current and former Academy students.