Lucerne Festival

This concert begins with Hector Berlioz’s wild concert overture Le Corsaire, based on the story of the same name by Lord Byron. Berlioz had first read it while seeking refuge from the heat in a church in Rome and made himself comfortable in a confessional with, of all things, this pirate story … This is followed by Jean Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony, his last, which is considered by many to be the Finnish composer’s finest. Rattle compares the effect of this music to the feeling of a droplet touching the skin and eating through to the bone. He will dance on the volcano’s edge with Maurice Ravel’s rapturous orchestral poem La Valse, making for a brilliant finale. But before that, he has brought us a surprise: Sun Poem by the British composer Daniel Kidane will be heard in their Swiss premiere. This son of a Russian and an Eritrean was born in 1986 and was featured with another work at the BBC’s renowned Last Night of the Proms in 2019.