The Met Orchestra | Yannick Nézet-Séguin | Joyce DiDonato | Mazzoli | Mahler

The charismatic Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin has been a regular guest at Lucerne Festival for the last 15 years - and one of its great audience favorites. He has appeared here with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and often with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra: each time a musical high point. Now, in this summer of “American Dreams,” he is visiting Lake Lucerne for the first time with his Met Orchestra from New York City, and he turns to one of his favorite composers: Gustav Mahler. Nézet-Séguin has chosen the Fourth Symphony, a work he considers “uniquely pure.” Yet this symphony, which undertakes a journey to paradise, is also full of depths and difficult to interpret. Serving as our “guide” in the finale who shows us the sights of the Garden of Eden, is the great Joyce DiDonato - a brilliant musical storyteller who shapes her gorgeous mezzo-soprano with the utmost refinement. She also performs Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, including the famous Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. When she sings this song, DiDonato remarks, she feels as though she is stepping into another universe.

Performers:
The Met Orchestra
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor
Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano

Program:
17.30 Introduction to the Concert with Malte Lohmann (Auditorium KKL Luzern, in German)

Missy Mazzoli (*1980)
Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) for orchestra

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)
Rückert-Lieder
Symphony No. 4 in G major

Intermission at c. 19.10