The Swiss city of Lucerne might be small, but it is a capital of classical music, with a number of festivals, including a stellar winter piano event
THEY DO things differently in Switzerland. The world’s leading orchestras stream through Lucerne for the city’s festival in August and September. Last year that involved 62 concerts and 72,600 tickets. There’s a shorter festival at Easter, a summer academy for contemporary music directed by Pierre Boulez, and since 1998 a winter festival focusing on the piano. This has grown into a week-long event that juxtaposes rising stars with established masters, and features performances on historic instruments as well as the newest of new music.
Lucerne is quite a small city and has a population of about 60,000, smaller than Galway. Its situation on Lake Lucerne is spectacular, offering water, mountains and snow, not to mention the world’s steepest cogwheel railway to take you up to the top of Mount Pilatus.
The city has its own symphony orchestra, a city theatre (which offers more opera performances than you’ll find in Dublin), and a renowned culture and congress centre, the Kultur und Kongresszentrum Luzern, known as the KKL (pronounced ka-ka-ell). Designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, it houses a highly regarded modern concert hall.
The centre is built on the shores of Lake Lucerne, and to get to the concert hall you have to cross wooden bridges over indoor water channels, the back of which juts out into the foyer spaces in the shape of a ship’s stern.
The hall has five levels and can seat 1,840. The curved white panels on its walls, each with intricate and highly varied patterns of honeycombs within honeycombs, can be rotated to open up acoustic chambers (themselves variable with movable hanging drapes) to change the sound characteristics of the auditorium.
At the piano festival in November, I heard three performances at the hall all from seats on the ground floor. Piano tone comes across rather differently than it does in Dublin’s National Concert Hall. It is fuller in the bass and without a hint of glassy brightness.
In the first concert, Bernard Haitink and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe presented a rather too sturdy account of Brahms’s Serenade in A, and offered full-toned partnership to Emanuel Ax in the composer’s Second Piano Concerto. The performances sounded well, but somehow contrived to be less than interesting.
Evgeny Kissin’s solo programme of Schumann and Chopin was in all respects at the opposite end of the spectrum. Kissin has put on a little weight and curtailed the reach of his mop of hair since I last heard him in concert. He looks less boyish now and he plays with a welcome new maturity, too. The overloud, overblown ranting which once marred his playing has disappeared, and the most fantastically precise of pianists has added new dimensions to his precision.
His Schumann (the Fantasiestücke, Op 12, and the Novellette, Op 21 No 8) had the necessary combination of inwardness and exuberance. He spun long lines with ease, and caught every last harmonic nuance as if time had stood still so that the moment could be perfectly shaped in every way. His treatment of Chopin's four Ballades combined narrative grace and excitement with rare tightness of discipline. Simply put, he just doesn't have to slow down to feign the expressive solutions that most other players conjure up when they run out of road, technically speaking.
Last up was Grigory Sokolov, a true pianist’s pianist, a man whose handling of the piano is loaded with the kind of technical sophistication that aficionados love. His most impressive achievement in Lucerne was Bach’s Partita in C minor, in which he delivered some of the two-part counterpoint with such controlled independence it sounded as if he might be playing a different instrument with each hand. This was Bach playing which sounded at once utterly pianistic and utterly pure.
In Brahms's Op 116 Fantasias and Schumann's Humoreskethe artifice was rather more pronounced. He made one aware of how intensively he had worked the music over, how fully he had probed every nook and cranny. He simply shunned any notion of plain-speaking delivery and unflinchingly made one aware of the complexity of thought and technique that could be lavished on these pieces.
His last item, Schumann's rarely heard Scherzo, Gigue, Romanze und Fughetta, Op 32, offered a stark contrast to a performance given earlier in the day by Andreas Staier, playing an 1850 Pleyel piano in the splendour of the ballroom of the Schweizerhof Hotel, whose 19th-century guests included Wagner, Tolstoy and Mark Twain.
Staier’s programme drew connections between Schumann and Bach on a number of levels, in performances that tended towards severity. Sokolov’s playing had a comparable fixity of vision, but his rigour never actually sounded severe. Hearing two such different performances of the same piece on such different instruments on the same day was both illuminating and frustrating, with each player tending to highlight virtues the other lacked. It’s only at a festival like Lucerne’s that the luxury of so direct a comparison between two such accomplished performers is ever likely to be thrown up in live performance.
