Coro in Lucerne, Oslo and Buenos Aires

On August 23 the Lucerne Festival 2014 dedicated its sixth symphonic concert to an exceptional performance of Luciano Berio’s Coro conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. Along with the chorus conductor James Wood, Rattle prepared the young talents – 40 singers and 43 players from all over the world – who were selected to form the choir and orchestra or the 11th edition of the Lucerne Festival Academy that was founded by Pierre Boulez in 2004. For a selection of photos from the rehearsals and performance of Coro in Lucerne click here.
The encounter between the director of the Berliner Philharmoniker (with whom he had given a memorable performance of Coro in 2010), James Wood (who had directed the choir also in Berlin) and the young musicians turned into a true laboratory leading to a musical and human experience that rendered justice to the spirit of Berio’s work, which he had compared to a «plan for an imaginary city, which is realized on different levels and generates, assembles and unifies different things and persons, revealing their individual and collective characters, their distance, their relationships and conflicts within real and virtual borders.» (For Berio’s note on Coro click here; for the synoptic entry click here).
The concert will be broadcast on BR-Klassik on September 11 at 8pm. For listening in streaming click here. For the concert program click here.

On September 8 and 9 the ensemble of the Lucerne Festival Academy conducted by Matthias Pintscher will perform Berio’s Tempi concertati during their tour in Cologne and in Gelsenkirchen. For further information click here.

Further performances of Coro are due on September 11 in Oslo, in the opening concerto fo the Ultima – Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, with the Choir and Orchestra of the Norwegian Radio conducted by Grete Pedersen, and on November 13 at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, with the Vocal Group Broadcasting and the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Emilio Pomarico.