Lucerne Festival
PROGRAMME
R. WAGNER Prelude to Opera Parsifal
F. MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 5 (Reformation)
R. WAGNER Walkürenritt (Ride of the Valkyries)
F. MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 3 Scottish
Lucerne Festival Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly conductor
ABOUT THIS CONCERT
Since 2003, when Claudio Abbado formed his own orchestra of players hand-picked from Europe's best ensembles, the MCO has formed the core of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra (LFO). This spring, music director Riccardo Chailly and the LFO have created a new annual festival. The first edition focuses on composer Felix Mendelssohn and his contemporaries, bringing Mendelssohn's five symphonies into dialogue with Richard Wagner, Robert Schumann, and Hector Berlioz.
Following Mendelssohn’s death, Richard Wagner vilified his colleague in a devastating anti-Semitic pamphlet titled Das Judentum in der Musik (“Judaism in Music”), accusing him of never having achieved a “profoundly heart-and-soul-gripping effect” in his works. Combining Mendelssohn's Third and Fifth Symphonies with Wagner's Prelude to Parsifal and the Ride of the Valkyries from the third act of his opera Die Walküre, this concert reveals Wagner's actual admiration for Mendelssohn and demonstrates how he often took up the composers’s ideas.
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