Lucerne Festival Orchestra. G. Mahler. Symphony No. 5

The International Festival of Academic Music in Lucerne is one of the oldest and most famous festivals in the world. The beginning of the festival is considered to be a concert on July 18, 1938 in the local hall, where the local orchestra, reinforced by musicians from the Orchestra of the Swiss Romande, under the direction of E. Ansermet performed Symphony No. 88 by J. Haydn. Since then, the festival has been held annually.

To accompany the festival, the Lucerne Festival Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1938. The first conductor was Arturo Toscanini. The orchestra existed until 1993 and was recreated in 2003 under the name Lucerne Festival Orchestra. It included world-famous musicians such as Kolya Blacher, Natalia Gutmann, Reinhold Friedrich and Sabine Meyer.

The Lucerne Festival Orchestra under the direction of Claudio Abbado performs Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony.

Mahler began work on the Fifth Symphony immediately after completing the Fourth, in 1901. On August 24, 1902, the composer informed his friends that the symphony was written. However, it was rewritten in fair copy only in the autumn of 1903, and even then Mahler was in no hurry to publish it. The Third Symphony, first performed later than the Fourth, in 1902 at the Krefeld Music Festival, turned out to be the most successful of all his works. For the first performance of the new work, the composer chose Cologne - a city where at least the Third Symphony was treated favorably. The premiere took place on October 18, 1904, like all the previous ones - under the baton of the author.

WORKS:

G. Mahler. Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor

PERFORMERS:

Lucerne Festival Orchestra

Conductor: Claudio Abbado

Congress Center, Lucerne, 2004