Festival Strings Lucerne
The Festival Strings Lucerne are an international chamber orchestra that has been closely associated with the Lucerne Conservatory and the Lucerne School of Music since it was founded, and has been an "ensemble in residence" for many years. They were founded by Wolfgang Schneiderhan and Rudolf Baumgartner in 1956 as part of the Lucerne International Music Festival (today: Lucerne Festival ) and were subsequently directed by Rudolf Baumgartner until 1998, first from the concert master's desk, and later as conductor. His successor as artistic director was Achim Fiedler from 1998 to summer 2012 . The Australian-Swiss violinist Daniel Dodds has been artistic director since the 2012/2013 season . Arabella Steinbacher is the ensemble's principal guest artist . In 1986, Rudolf Baumgartner established the “Foundation Festival Strings Lucerne”, which, as a publicly funded, non-profit corporation, took over the sponsorship of the ensemble. Hans-Christoph Mauruschat has been the managing director since 2009 .
Act
The Lucerne Festival Strings began in the first year of their existence to gain an excellent international reputation with recordings for Deutsche Grammophon , with which they had an exclusive contract. From the late 1950s onwards, the Lucerne Festival Strings were among the pioneers of Deutsche Grammophon's “Archive” series, which made record history with the first publication of works by forgotten or hardly known composers, especially from the Baroque period, such as Giuseppe Tartini (1959). In addition to numerous recordings for Decca , Eurodisc and Denon , the orchestra has produced CDs for OehmsClassics and Sony Classical in recent years . The recording of the Bach piano concertos together with the pianist Martin Stadtfeld (2006) received an ECHO Klassik in 2007 . Recently, new recordings with works by Shostakovich , Tchaikovsky and Dvořák as well as Britten and Mendelssohn were released every year (a complete recording of the string symphonies on 3 CDs: “Reference recording”, Der KulturSpiegel, January 2010).
Since it was founded in 1956, the orchestra has been a regular guest at the Lucerne International Music Festival, and from 1959 to 1970 it exclusively oversaw the “musica nova” series. The ensemble was able to premier over 100 works by composers such as Jean Françaix , Frank Martin , Bohuslav Martinů , Peter Mieg , Sándor Veress , Iannis Xenakis and Krzysztof Penderecki .
The soloists with whom the orchestra has worked include: Yehudi Menuhin , Zino Francescatti , David Oistrach , Henryk Szeryng , Arthur Grumiaux , Pablo Casals , Pierre Fournier , Clara Haskil , Eduard Kaufmann , Wilhelm Kempff , Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau , Anne- Sophie Mutter , Pinchas Zukerman , Gidon Kremer , Leonidas Kavakos or, more recently, Sabine Meyer , Maxim Vengerov , James Galway , Albrecht Mayer and Mischa Maisky .