Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Tour

by Andrew Patner / The Chicago Sun Times (September 15, 1998)

LUCERNE, Switzerland - When Georg Solti conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Lucerne’s International Music Festival in 1985, he drew sympathetic applause from the Swiss listeners when he told them that if the city could afford to build a modern train station, it could also afford to build a modern concert hall.

Thirteen years later, and not a minute too soon, what Solti hoped would happen has happened.

To coincide with the festival’s 60th anniversary and the 150th anniversary of Swiss confederation, the festival’s management has opened a dynamic new 1840-seat concert hall and made it the centerpiece of a $185-million ultra modern Culture and Convention Center at the edge of Lake Lucerne.

Last weekend, the CSO under Daniel Barenboim joined the parade of international orchestras — including, earlier this summer, the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra - in inaugurating the facility, which opened August 19.

Designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, the hall reaches out toward the rippling waters - Lake Lucerne is literally a swan lake - with a striking cantilever roof that projects more than 100 feet beyond the building’s multicolored, steel-and-glass facade. In many ways its imposing high-tech design symbolizes Lucerne’s entre into the 21st Century, forming a striking contrast to the medieval stone turrets, Baroque churches and ancient wooden pedestrian walkway of the old city.

Already “one of the top instrumental festivals in the world,” according to Matthias Bamert (the Swiss conductor who is stepping down this year after 16 years as festival director), Lucerne has raised the cultural bar even farther. When completed next year, the complex “will include a multi-purpose hall, an art museum and a convention center. From now on, Bamert predicts, cognosceni will mention Lucerne in the same breath as the other leading European festivals of Salzburg, Bayreuth, Glyndebourne and Aix-en-Provence. The assertion seems a fair prediction, not a casual boast.

The weekend concerts by the CSO were part of an ambitious four-week “festival of festivals” that is to be followed in November by a new Lucerne Piano Festival and an Easter Festival next year. Rubbing elbows with capacity crowds of mainly Swiss music lovers was a contingent of Chicago cheerleaders that included Maggie Daley, representing her husband, Mayor Richard Daley, at a ceremony proclaiming Lucerne a sister city to Chicago.

But nothing gave greater cause for celebration than the hall itself. Sonically, this is the finest of the four European concert halls the orchestra has visited this summer. Its warm and resonant, yet clear and detailed sound - designed by the renowned American acoustician Russell Johnson - has great presence. The sonics flattered the CSO’s turbo-charged brilliance while giving the strings a shimmering depth that lent extra emotional charge to Tchaikovsky’s “Pathetique” Symphony. Afterward, conductor and orchestra members all praised the quality of the acoustics.

Flexibility is key to the success of the sound. The off-white walls on either side of the hall feature heavy adjustable panels that can be moved in and out, depending on the size of the performing forces. At Barenboim’s first concert here on Friday, Johnson and his Artec Consultants team slightly changed the panels’ position between the first half of the program (Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegel” and Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra) and the second (Tchaikovsky). The improvement was noticeable.

There can be no doubt that the CSO will want to perform here every summer it visits Europe, or that incoming festival managerMichael Haefliger will be eager to invite the orchestra back. Certainly the audience response could hardly have been more positive, allowing for the traditional Swiss reserve.