Riccardo Chailly / Lucerne Festival Orchestra STRAVINSKY Chant Funèbre - Le Sacre du Printemps

In 2015, an early piece by Stravinsky, lost for over a century, made headlines when it was rediscovered among a pile of manuscripts in the St Petersburg Conservatory. Chant Funèbre was composed in 1908, after the death of Stravinsky’s teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and it received a single performance at a concert in the conservatory the following January. But then the score and parts disappeared, and though Stravinsky himself remembered it as one of the best of his early works, the assumption was that it had been destroyed during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.

Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra gave the first modern performance of Chant Funèbre in St Petersburg in December 2016, and subsequently the piece has been performed around the world. Decca secured the rights to make the first commercial recording, however, and it features on Riccardo Chailly’s first disc with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, devoted to early Stravinsky.

What makes Chant Funèbre so fascinating is not that it illuminates more detail of Stravinsky’s journey towards the three ballet scores for Diaghilev that would make his name, but how it reveals a path he would not explore any further. In this steady processional, the highly coloured world inherited from Rimsky is replaced by something much darker and more Wagnerian; there are hints of Parsifal especially.

Chailly follows it with three other early pieces – Fireworks and the Scherzo Fantastique, and the tiny Pushkin settings of Le Faune et la Bergère (in which the mezzo Sophie Koch is the subtly nuanced soloist) – each of which hints at what was soon to come, while Chant Funèbre very definitely stands apart.

The whole sequence, brilliantly coloured and played with immaculate precision by the LFO, takes up half of this disc. It is followed by an equally brilliant account of The Rite of Spring, though one that takes a little while to catch fire. It’s more detailed, and more measured, than the version Chailly recorded in 1985 with the Cleveland Orchestra, but equally convincing in its own way. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)

Claudio Abbado / Lucerne Festival Orchestra BRUCKNER Symphony No. 9

Claudio Abbado's concerts were life-changing events for anyone lucky enough to hear them. Towards the end of his life, above all with the concerts he gave with his Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which he founded in 2003 and with whom he gave the last concerts of his life – unforgettable, utterly shattering performances of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Bruckner's Ninth - Abbado had taken orchestral music into a new realm of possibility and experience.

The Lucerne project was the zenith of a life in music that had as its essential credo a word that you don't always associate with conductors, those supposed tyrants of the podium: "listen". He used that word more than any other in the rehearsals I saw him lead with the orchestra, a hand-picked ensemble of some of the greatest chamber musicians, orchestral players, and soloists in the world, with the young musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at its core (another orchestra Abbado founded, in addition to the European Union Youth Orchestra, the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, and Orchestra Mozart). The message of listening was about encouraging every player in the huge ensemble needed to play Mahler's symphonies to listen to one another, to know the score as well as he did. Their performances of all but the 8th, which Abbado didn't have the chance to play in Lucerne, are the most revelatory and moving Mahler performances of recent decades - arguably ever. The orchestra played with the subtlety, freedom, and intensity of chamber music, revealing new light on the music from within.

But there was another, deeper kind of listening that Abbado wanted to create, and that was to catalyse his musicians and his audiences to listen, to have contact with the musical substance not merely of the sounds the orchestra makes, but with the silence that comes before and after the music. That sounds ludicrous, paradoxical for a concert of orchestral music, which is all about the sounds, after all! But with those musicians in Lucerne, Abbado was able to lift the veil on some other realm of experience, to put us in touch with a larger mystery even than the notes the orchestra was playing.

And what might seem riddle-like in words is unarguably, tangibly real when you encounter it: watch and listen to Abbado's performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony (all the Mahler performances, and many of the other Lucerne concerts, are on DVD or Blu-Ray) to hear the most profoundly full, physical silence you may ever experience at the end of the final movement. Mahler's music passes into another world in the closing bars of the symphony; the silence that Abbado, the musicians, and the audience share after the sounds of the orchestra have crossed the border into nothingness actually embodies whatever that place might be. At the opposite end of the expressive extreme, but with exactly the same power to warp space, time, and existence, was the miraculous, massive coda of Bruckner's Fifth Symphony, when Abbado brought the Lucerne orchestra to the Royal Festival Hall in London, a performance that catapulted its audience into the cosmos. 

Abbado's concerts with Lucerne always had these moments of epiphany, of revelation. But last year's programmes in Lucerne were different. That Schubert Unfinished and Bruckner 9 took place in that transfigured state of being from the very first note to the last. The whole concert was a communion between Abbado and his players of devastating intimacy and astonishing emotional bravery, which asked the most profound questions about what the musical experience, and even what life might be about, with its beginnings and unfinished endings, its questions and unfilled answers, its sounds and its silences. Abbado's concerts weren't mere performances of pieces of music, they were searing, transformative existential journeys. That they have come to an end is an unimaginable loss. (Tom Service / The Guardian)

Hélène Grimaud / Claudio Abbado A RUSSIAN NIGHT (RACHMANINOV Piano Concerto No. 2 / TCHAIKOVSKY The Tempest / STRAVINSKY The Firebird)

When Claudio Abbado conducts the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, he feels, by his own admission, to be “among old friends" and has “the special sense of being back home". This familiarity is due above all to his close links with Lucerne, for it was here that he chose to revive the idea of an elite orchestra similar to the one formed by Arturo Toscanini for Lucerne Festival in 1938. The result was the Lucerne Festival Orchestra that Abbado helped to establish in 2003, drawing on a select band of hand-picked musicians and realizing his vision of an orchestra close to his ideal of an enlarged chamber ensemble: the nucleus of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra is the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, which is complemented by members of other international orchestras and by outstanding chamber musicians, with soloists of the calibre of Sabine Meyer, Wolfram Christ, Clemens Hagen and Reinhold Friedrich on the front desks. The orchestra's concertmaster (leader), Kolja Blacher, has sought to account for the uniqueness of an ensemble which, under its artistic director Claudio Abbado, is characterized by friendship and respect: “What is so special about our orchestra? We don't have to play together, we want to!"

During the summer of 2008 Claudio Abbado conducted a concert with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra that threw light on various facets of Russian life and music. Two works - Tchaikovsky's symphonic fantasia inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest and Stravinsky's concert suite from his fairytale ballet The Firebird - depict the dramatic struggle between the forces of good and evil and the ultimate triumph of the former. And Hélène Grimaud was the soloist in a performance of one of the classics of the late Romantic repertoire, Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto.

Rachmaninov's piano works have long featured in Hélène Grimaud's repertory. She devoted her very first recording to solo works of the Russian composer in July 1985, and his Second Piano Concerto of 1900­01 was the work with which she made her debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker under Claudio Abbado in 1995. Since then this dark, soulful and “most Russian" of Rachmaninov's works has continued to haunt her: “It was love at first sight," Hélène Grimaud enthuses, even today. “Afterwards, it's true, I rather neglected the work, but that neglect was intentional because at one time I played it often." Today, however, the Second Piano Concerto again accompanies the pianist on her concert tours all over the world: “It's a work that is noble, pure and of very harmonious proportions, but it also involves a certain risk, because you must stay focused on the structure of the piece, on the line, and on the overarching form."

For Hélène Grimaud, to rehearse the concerto with Claudio Abbado at Lucerne Festival in August 2008 was, as she put it, “a dream". For her, the conductor is “a man of great depth and kindness, yet he also has a very special aura to him". His love of the music, the pianist goes on, communicates itself to the players and audience and fosters a wordless agreement between conductor and soloist. “You really don't need to speak or to translate an emotion or a sentiment into words", because Abbado himself already expresses all that is necessary. “You can read it all in his glance, in his face. There's a great clarity about it all, the way in which he conducts and his intentions are absolutely clear". It was also a stroke of good luck for Hélène Grimaud to work with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, “an orchestra that has a magnificent commitment to the music, one that has density and lightness at the same time". In this way, “pure music" could be produced in an atmosphere far removed from the usual routine of rehearsals. Perhaps it was the intensity of her work with Claudio Abbado and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra that ultimately helped Hélène Grimaud to approach the concerto afresh: “The piece continues to develop within you, even when you're not actively involved with it, so that when you return to it, it has clearly become a completely different work. That is always fascinating but sometimes more complex than developing a new relationship with a new piece."

The extent to which vivid characterization depends on orchestral playing that is alert, vital and at the same time subtly balanced with chamber-like translucency is clear from the three characters that inhabit Tchaikovsky's symphonic fantasia, The Tempest: the radiant lovers Miranda and Ferdinand and the monster of the darkness, Caliban. When the composer's patron, Nadezhda von Meck, first heard the work, which had received its triumphant first performance at a Russian Music Society concert in Moscow on 19 December 1873, she summed up its impact on her as “magnificent sounds, capable of filling the whole world and affording a person happiness, enjoyment and delight". With its atmospheric reminiscences of Wagner, its thrilling account of the sea and the storm and its lyrical love themes, The Tempest was long regarded as Tchaikovsky's best-loved concert work.

But the most striking demonstration of an orchestra casting aside all sense of routine was afforded by the final piece in Claudio Abbado's Russian programme, Stravinsky's The Firebird, a score that made its composer famous overnight when it was unveiled in Paris on 25 June 1910. Lucerne's listeners were regaled with pianissimos that grew more intense, the quieter they became. No less impressive were the subtlest transitions and shadings, which none the less emerged with the most thrilling sense of drama. For the performance in Lucerne, Claudio Abbado opted for a composite version of the score, taking over the sequence of movements from the second, five-movement concert suite of 1919 but eschewing the reduced orchestra of twenty players that Stravinsky, taking account of post-war shortages, envisaged for this second suite. With its sumptuous forces, this performance was entirely in the spirit of the programme as a whole: firmly rooted in the Russian tradition - after all, Stravinsky originally wrote the piece for the famous Ballets Russes. But the forces of good and evil confront one another in richly colourful and exotic sounds, forces embodied, on the one hand, by the young Prince Ivan, whom the liberated Firebird helps with a miraculous feather, and, on the other, by Kashchei, the prince of Hell. But perhaps Claudio Abbado's decision to opt for the full orchestral version was motivated simply by his desire to feel “among old friends". 

(Susanne Schmerda)