Lucerne Festival Orchestra & Riccardo Chailly
Biography Lucerne Festival Orchestra & Riccardo Chailly
Riccardo Chailly
has been the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA’s new Music Director since the summer of 2016. Born in 1953 in Milan, he studied at the Conservatories of Perugia, Rome, and Milan and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana and began his career as an assistant to Claudio Abbado at La Scala in Milan. Chailly was appointed Music Director of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1980, and in 1988 he moved to the same position with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, which he helmed for sixteen years. From 2005 to the summer of 2016, Riccardo Chailly served as head of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and since January 2015 he has been Music Director of La Scala in Milan. Chailly regularly conducts such leading European orchestras as the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestre de Paris. In the United States he has worked with the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As an opera conductor – in addition to his performances at La Scala – he has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Royal Opera House in London, Zurich Opera, the Bavarian and Vienna Staatsoper companies, Chicago Lyric Opera, and San Francisco Opera. Riccardo Chailly has received many prizes for his more than 150 CDs, including two Echo Klassik Awards (in 2012 and 2015); Gramophone magazine chose his account of the Brahms symphonies as Recording of the Year in 2014. Riccardo Chailly is a Grand’Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, Cavaliere di Gran Croce, and Cavaliere dell’Ordine del Leone d’Olanda. In 1996 he was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music in London, and in France he has been an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France since 2011.
LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 7 September 1988 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in a program of works by Wagenaar, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky.
Lucerne Festival Orchestra
The idea for a unique festival orchestra of international standing in Lucerne goes back to Arturo Toscanini, who in 1938 convened acclaimed virtuosos of the time into an elite ensemble with the legendary “Concert de Gala.” It was 65 years later that the conductor Claudio Abbado and Festival Executive and Artistic Director Michael Haefliger established a connection to this moment of the Festival’s birth and founded the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA, which made its public debut in August 2003. With Riccardo Chailly, this unique orchestra once again has an Italian music director.
The idea of friendship and freedom forms the leitmotiv for this ensemble, whose ideal is a chamber music-like spirit of cooperation. Many stars of the classical music scene have played in the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA over the years: members of the Alban Berg, Hagen, and Leipzig String Quartets; the violinist Kolja Blacher; the violists Wolfram Christ and Antoine Tamestit; the cellists Jens Peter Maintz, Natalia Gutman, and Julian Steckel; the flutists Jacques Zoon and Emmanuel Pahud; the clarinetists Sabine Meyer and Alessandro Carbonare; the oboists Lucas Macías Navarro and Albrecht Mayer; the horn players Alessio Allegrini and Ivo Gass; the trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich; the trombonist Jörgen van Rijen; the timpanist Raymond Curfs; and the list goes on and on … and every summer still more new names come along.
The orchestra sets the tone for the opening week of LUCERNE FESTIVAL with several symphony concerts. Its members also perform chamber concerts in various unusual smaller formations. And at the season’s end comes the grand tour. Foreign residencies have taken these musicians throughout Europe and to Asia and the USA.
