Architecture Joins Music as Star of the Lucerne Festival

by Alan Riding / The New York Times (August 25, 1998)

LUCERNE, Switzerland, Aug.20 - It is perhaps a measure of the mysterious power of opera that the summer music festival in Lucerne is far less well known than those of, say, Salzburg, Bayreuth, Aix-en-Provence and even Glyndebourne. Of these five, Lucerne alone does not present opera, limiting itself to a busy program of concerts and recitals. And that, it seems, suffices to give it a more modest place in Europe’s crowded calendar of festivals.

Yet, if judged by quality rather than publicity, Lucerne’s International Music Festival is hard to match. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam show up here every summer, while this year’s four week festival, which runs through Sept. 16, is also presenting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and five other leading ensembles.

Similarly, this year’s roster of big-name conductors includes Claudio Abbado, James Levine, Daniel Barenboim, Kent Nagano, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Riccardo Chailly and Lorin Maazel, Further, there are piano recitals by Maurizio Pollini, Andras Schiff and violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and the mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli.

Yet, for all that, the real star of Lucerne’s 60th music festival is architecture in the shape of a striking new concert hall. Designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, it forms part of a $134 million Lucerne Culture and Convention Center, which will include a multipurpose hall, a convention center and a Museum of Fine Arts when completed next year. The concert hall alone was inaugurated by Mr. Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra on Wednesday.

For this centuries-old city, the ultramodern center, with its glass and multicolored steel facade and its dramatic cantilever roof projecting more than 100 feet beyond the main building, represents a dramatic break with tradition. Standing on the edge of Lake Lucerne, it looks out toward 17th-century houses, an ancient wooden bridge and medieval stone watchtowers.

Had Mr. Nouvel’s original plan been accepted, the center would have been even more revolutionary. In 1990, he won a competition with a design that would have had the center jutting out on the lake itself, but the city council then asked a Swiss Architect, Rodolphe Luscher, who placed third in the competition, to build the complex. Two years later, M. Luscher was dropped and Mr. Nouvel was recalled, but on condition that the lake remain untouched.

“If I cannot go to the water, the water shall come to me,” he decided. And, with that, he designed two channels of shallow water that run through the complex and effectively separate it into three sections. Mr. Nouvel has also sought to draw the lake into the corner by adding large picture windows and a summer terrace.

The 1,840-seat concert hall, though, was to prove his greatest challenge. His brief was to design what is known as a “shoe box” hall-that is, rectangular with a flat ceiling. “This is what the conductors and music lovers prefer,” he noted. He added four balconies, each with narrow “arms” that stretch on either side of the hall, and four rows of seats were include behind the orchestra below the organ.

Before construction began, however, Mr. Nouvel was joined by the renowned American acoustician Russell Johnson. The connection was fortuitous - while conducting at the Symphony Hall in Birmingham, England, the festival’s director, Mathias Bamert, was impressed by the acoustics designed by Mr. Johnson - and would prove felicitous. “I am the guardian of the eye,” Mr. Nouvel, 51, explained. “Russ Johnson is the guardian of the ear.”

Apart from including a traditional flexible canopy and identifying the natural reverberance of the floor, stage and walls, Mr. Johnson and his Artec Consultants staff introduced heavy pivotal panels covered with hollow geometric motifs on either side of the hall. Depending on the needs of the music, these panels remain closed or can open to any angle up to 90 degrees.

“The audience must be able to hear in every seat,” explained Mr. Johnson, 74, tapping decades of experience in concert halls around the world. “The conductor and musicians on stage must also hear each other and have a sense of what it sounds like in the hall. The aim is simultaneous clarity with some reverberance. You also have to work very carefully to get the silence right. The acoustician builds his signature on that silence.”

After the inaugural concert, comprising Wolfgang Rihm’s 1995 composition “In-Schrift” and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Mr. Abbado gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up to the acoustics. The Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, who performed in the Beethoven symphony, said the sound in the new hall was “wonderful.” Mr. Johnson, though, expects to work here for another three years before he is satisfied with the acoustics.

As “guardian of the eye,” however, Mr. Nouvel had to make some concessions. Best known for his designs of the Arab Institute and the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, both in Paris, Mr. Nouvel, also rebuilt the 19th-century opera house in Lyons, adding a stunning arched roof and, most memorably, an entirely black decor inside the auditorium. In Lucerne, he again wanted a full concert hall of dark colors, but faced a rebellion.

“In an opera house, the room disappears,” Mr. Bamert said, recalling the debate over color. “In a concert hall, the room is always there. It took Jean Nouvel a while to get this. The hall cannot compete emotionally with the music. Nouvel thought we didn’t like the colors. They were beautiful, but that was the point.”

The architect finally surrendered, using rich reds, greens and blues for the facade and Bordeaux red for the lobbies and corridors leading to the hall, but opting for white in the hall itself. “So having made an all-black opera house in Lyons, I have now made an all white-concert hall in Lucerne,” he said with a laugh. Mr. Bamert could not be happier with the result. Having run the festival since 1992, the soft-spoken Swiss conductor, who is also music director of the London Mozart Players, now feels ready to leave his post here at the end of this year (he will be succeeded by Michael Haeflinger, currently director of the Davos International Music Festival’s “Young Artists in Concert” program).

Before then, though, to an existing annual Easter Festival, Mr. Bamert is adding a new Lucerne Piano Festival from Nov. 19 to 22 this fall, all part of a strategy to make as much use as possible of the new concert hall (which will also become the permanent home of the Lucerne symphony Orchestra). Further, he has organized a symposium, “The Festival in the 21st Century,” from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, to stimulate debate among musicians, cultural managers and politicians over the future of festivals.

Underlining his fascination with this form of musical jamboree, Mr. Bamert even chose festivals for this year’s festival theme. Thus, as a nod to Lucerne’s 60th birthday, in the coming days the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra and Chorus will perform part of Wagner’s “Meistersinger” and “Götterdammerung” in concert while the Salzburg Festival will present its new production of Messiaen’s “Saint Francis,” also in concert.

So could Lucerne also be bending to the temptation of opera? “Of course, with a hall like this we can now contemplate putting on semi-staged operas,” Mr. Haefliger said. “But my main challenge will be to persuade great orchestras and conductors to keep coming here, perhaps even to stay a little longer. I’d also like to influence the programs a bit more. Next year’s theme is the myth at the end of the century.”