August 2021
The Mahler Chamber Orchestra returns to its summer home, the annual residency at the Lucerne Festival. 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, which performs at the 2021 summer edition with music director Riccardo Chailly and conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
The theme of this year's festival, "Crazy," was chosen to reflect our turbulent, unprecedented times, where the familiar notion of normality seems lost, or certainly less secure. So each programme reflects this, with works and composers that to varying degrees abandoned convention in pursuit of new ideas.