Il compositore tedesco Wolfgang Rihm dal 2016 assumerà la carica di direttore artistico del Lucerner Festival Academy.

Starting in the summer of 2016, the German composer Wolfgang Rihm (in the photo) will assume overall artistic directorship of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY. The conductor and composer Matthias Pintscher will support him as Principal Conductor and will be responsible each summer for a central Academy program; he will additionally focus on developing the Academy Orchestra. Both contracts are for a period of five years. The founder of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY, Pierre Boulez, will continue to remain in close dialogue with Wolfgang Rihm, Matthias Pintscher, and the Festival team as Honorary President of the Academy. For twelve years the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY has been regarded as a unique international educational campus in the field of contemporary classical music of the 20th and 21st centuries. It offers continuing training not only for some 120 instrumentalists between 18 and 32 years of age but also for young directors and composers.

“I am extremely delighted that in the person of Wolfgang Rihm a leading figure of contemporary music will be taking over artistic leadership of the LUCERNE FESTIVAL ACADEMY,” remarks Michael Haefliger, LUCERNE FESTIVAL’s Executive and Artistic Director. “On the strength of his experience and his knowledge in connection with the Academy, Wolfgang Rihm will be in a position to establish new directions for linking creativity with effective ways of working together for young instrumentalists, conductors, and composers. This summer Matthias Pintscher has returned for a third time as a teacher and conductor to help shape the Academy’s work in marvelous ways, as seen for example in the recent “Day for Pierre Boulez”. To have secured him as the future Principal Conductor will be a great enhancement for LUCERNE FESTIVAL!”

As far as Wolfgang Rihm is concerned, it is important to continue leading the Academy in the tradition of its founder Pierre Boulez, thereby further expanding the intensive interchange among top-class young instrumentalists, conductors, and composers. “For young artists it can be tremendously enlightening to work with composers from their own time. It often happens that misleading, myopic views that are commonplace impede access to the reality of a score. Conversely, an encounter with praxis is often essentially more important for young composers than yet another turn of the artificial screw. For imagination also arises from knowledge of the technical conditions for realizing a score. And so this is what we expect from an Academy: that cultural spheres of knowledge and skill will be brought into mutual contact, shaping and enhancing each other in terms of the potential for understanding and realization. A musical text requires a performance that makes it a reality. Yet this is a form of prefigured understanding. Academy is dialogue!”