At the Lucerne Festival, contemporary music takes up its summer quarters

Full house for contemporary music at the Lucerne Festival, this Saturday August 27th. The morning started beautifully in the small gray auditorium of the Hochschule Luzern, the Salquin Hall, which hosts the Ensemble Recherche – violinist Melise Mellinger, violist Geneviève Strosser, cellist Asa Akerberg, clarinettist Shizuyo Oka and pianist Klaus Steffes-Hollander. A program mainly devoted to composers of Germanic origin. What the Swedish Lisa Streich (born in 1985) is not quite, despite her studies in Berlin, Salzburg and Cologne, and her piece for clarinet and string trio, Nebensonnencreated in 2015 on the occasion of the 80th birthday of Helmut Lachenmann, a tutelary figure present in the room.

The title – The Three Suns – refers to the penultimate of the twenty-four lieder of the Winterreise of Schubert, antechamber of madness and loneliness. The music deploys a nebulous orb, slow harmonics of strings, blurry sounds of the clarinet, which pierces here and there the painful dissonance of stridulating high notes, melting the four instruments into an ardent, unbearable sound, like a laser beam. Very moving, the quivering little final melody played by the violin and the viola, back to back, a mock quotation and farewell. It is precisely the mention “My Farewells” that Helmut Lachenmann attached to his second Streichtrio (string trio), performed in world premiere on May 8, before being given in Paris on June 18 as part of the ManiFeste festival.

An inspired page, both intense and sensitive, nourished by lyrical impulses and more dreamlike tracks, combining within the instrumental material the breath of the human body. Flashes of fantastic rides, ghosts of melodies draped in the filigree of the strings, Lachenmann develops scrambled sounds, grunts, screeches, onomatopoeias, resonances of fingers hammering the strings, bows rubbing the volute or the outside of the bridge, blazing breaths. Widely applauded, the old gentleman who will be 87 years old on 1^er November will take the podium to congratulate the three musicians to whom he dedicated this beautiful opus.

Festive and nostalgic parade

Wolfgang Rihm, whose 70th birthday is being celebrated, is also in the audience. But the musician, who supervises the Lucerne Festival’s Composition Academy, will greet the assembly from his wheelchair. Digit IV is part of a digital cycle he composed between 1982 and 1985, to which the mysterious and tragic color of the bass clarinet, the percussive punches of the piano, the anguished scansions of the cello, confer an expressive imprint to which only responds the vertigo of silence. Ten years younger than him, the Swiss Dieter Ammann closes the concert with Gehörte Form – Tributesthree pieces with incisive writing, sometimes spectacular, sounding more “classic” than that of its elders despite a polystylism which does not hesitate – title obliges – to fire on any wood.

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