Lucerne festival 2024 review – from blazing Bruckner to a Georgian wunderkind

Star turns by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Lisa Batiashvili and more delight, but much of this month-long festival’s power lies behind the scenes…

A lone horn call, then a brief, mighty climax, full orchestra playing fortissimo. The Symphony No 7 by Anton Bruckner, the 200th anniversary of whose birth falls on Wednesday, ends like an intake of breath. The noisy rampage of these final bars, which could go on at length as Bruckner often does, stops abruptly: one terse chord, a single beat in an otherwise empty bar. In a live performance, there might be a sense of surprise – is that the end? – though we can always rely on a keen (for which read maddening) bravo to tell us, several split seconds too soon, that yes, it is indeed all over.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducting the Lucerne Festival Orchestra at the KKL concert hall in Lucerne last weekend, managed something exceptional. In a transparent, flowing but never hurried performance, he made Bruckner’s finale more than the usual exuberant close of a big romantic work. The momentum was so urgent, so intense, it became a glimpse into the abyss. Bruckner, typified as the lonely eccentric (the word simpleton has been used), was here seen as radical, daring, pushing all to the limit. Silence was the only retort. Nézet-Séguin, arms aloft, defied anyone, orchestra or audience, to move. We remained stock still, as we might at the end of a Bach Passion but not a Bruckner symphony. At last he dropped his arms, and the standing ovation erupted.

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