After a trip of about 21 hours home to hotel -- planes, train and automobile -- we arrived at lovely Lucerne (Luzern), Switzerland. Check-in at the Hotel del Alpes in old town was friendly and easy. The view from a river-facing room takes in the famous wooden Chapel Bridge, the river Reuss and Mount Pilatus.

Our trip was planned around attendance of concerts at the Lucerne Festival in Summer.
On Friday, our first full day in Luzern, we sailed beautiful Lake Lucerne to the lakeside town of Vitznau. From there, the trip to Rigi Kulm, the top of Mt. Rigi, is by cogwheel train, steeply at times. Though the sky was not crystal clear, the weather cooperated well enough, and the view of the surrounding hills and lakes below, and glimpses of the Alps, were wonderful.

For the return trip, we took a cable car down from Rigi Kaltbad, most of the way up the relatively flat-topped Rigi, down to the lakeside town of Weggis. A fun ride made all the more so by whoops of enjoyment from a few kids on board.

I was full of anticipation for our first concert, a performance by Claudio Abbado conducting the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, featuring piano soloist Radu Lupu. Maestro Abbado, in his years since forming the new, regular version of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, has nearly completed what many consider an ongoing, sine qua non series of Mahler's symphonies with this orchestra. I have blu-ray discs or DVD's of the symphonies recorded so far, and they are uniformly spectacular. This is an orchestra that plays with chamber-music clarity, with great heart and soul, peopled by some of the greatest musicians in Europe. Maestro Abbado is clearly beloved by the orchestra members, many of whom have worked with him since their beginnings in one of the youth orchestras he champions.

Best nightlife so far: Saturday an apparent wedding party on the riverfront below our hotel deck, with the groom in bunny ears and a contingent of friends on the riverside walkway accompanied by a mobile bar mounted on a skateboard. A group of young women in what looked like beauty pageant uniforms with red sashes, sauntered by and joined a loud group of guys in identical blue t-shirts in front of the pub. Some of the guys stuffed a baby carriage with beer for a second mobile bar once the skateboard version ran dry. Throw in a school mascot or something (it was very orange and looked somewhat like a bear). We didn't play wedding crashers but should have, considering that the noise kept us up most of the night...

Worst nightlife: Dinner Thursday, night of our arrival at a riverside hotel restaurant which shall remain unnamed. Our server must have been auditioning for a part in a TV series about cougars or something, hitting on every woman captively seated in the area. His best line for "Gidget" (my wife, inside joke for some of her friends) was, "Are you magic?" Spoken in impeccable English, so no, not a problem of translation. To which we missed our chance to say, 'No, because as hard as you're trying to be Prince Charming, you're still a toad."

Best concert so far: Saturday with Abbado doing the D Minor Brahms Piano Concerto (with Lupu, considered by many to be particularly good in Brahms), the Prelude to Act I of Wagner's Lohengrin, and the Adagio from Mahler's unfinished 10th symphony. Amazing detail, terrific work in all the sections (kudos to the timpanist and principal horn who have major parts in the Brahms), a poetic reading by Lupu, bringing a level of maturity to the sturm und drang of the early Brahms work. The conclusion was a superb performance of the Adagio (which among the Mahler I have heard, I find to be a bit disjointed and -- sacrilege to any Mahler lovers who might stumble upon this -- frankly long even for Mahler, which is saying something. Abbado, however, made it work for me... except there are still a few extra notes for my taste.

Worst concert so far: Strangely, the very same program the previous night (Friday). Lupu was poetic at times, but rushed at least half a bar ahead of the orchestra at least twice toward the end of the First Movement, and made a few mistakes. That of course happens in live concerts, but this was not fated to be the great first concert in Lucerne I had envisioned. Lupu was a relatively late replacement for pianist Helene Grimaud under mysterious circumstances (announced to be artistic differences), so perhaps more rehearsal time with the orchestra might have made a difference and the Saturday night performance profited from the Friday night effort?

Additionally, during Lupu's encore, a huge no-no: Someone's phone ringtone went off not once, but twice, the second time, staying on for quite some time during an otherwise quiet, rhapsodic stretch in Lupu's piece. Or: We charitably think it was a ringtone. It sounded disturbingly like someone trying to follow along with the piano music on a kazoo or a comb with wax paper. Maybe a patron was disappointed that Mr. Lupu, with his wild shock of grey hair and stoic upright chair in lieu of a typical piano bench, doesn't much resemble the glamorous Ms. Grimaud? (jk)

In any event, I bet this was a rare, maybe even unprecedented Lucerne pitfall, given the sophistication of the Lucerne audience. To use an overused term: surreal. But the terrific, and thankfully disturbance-free perfomance on Saturday, more than made up.