Chamber music at the KKL

Most of the symphony and large ensemble concerts at the Lucerne Festival take place at the KKL (culture and convention center). The KKL was designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and built in the late 1990's. It features water (the adjoining lake, fountains, and actual waterways intruding finger-like into the structure at ground level, suggesting a ship upon the lake), extensive glass which changes with the daylight (and highlights interior neon lighting at night), and an angular, oversized roof.

The concert hall is relatively long and narrow with 4 balcony levels, seating a little under 2000. The acoustics have been described as excellent and that was our experience for the Abbado concerts. For our chamber music concert, the size of the hall was not ideal (too large), but the great acoustics allowed detail and clarity of individual parts to shine through nonetheless.

Tuesday's concert featured some "bon bons" in the form of simple German dances by Schubert, written for string quartet; a curiosity (at least to me) in the form of Shotakovich's 15th Symphony (1971) transcribed for piano, celesta, solo violin, solo cello and various pecussion instruments (3 musicians handled the substantial percussion roles); and a relatively well-known item in the form of Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht in original scoring for string sextet.

The playing was phenomenal. Entries were crisp and the balance among the small ensembles of instruments was perfect. The Shostakovich was interesting for the engaging string solo parts, varying rhythms and colorations, and whimsical or perhaps more likely, ironic quotations from or allusions to other pieces of music. To me the piece seems more sardonic than whimsical, but I don't know it and haven't studied it. No doubt there was much happening in this piece which sailed over my head. I did catch quotations from Wagner's Ring and Tristan, which veered off in strange directions. And a bit of the theme song from the Lone Ranger, or to music snobs, Rossini's William Tell Overture-- though given the date when Shotakovich wrote this symphony and its tone, I would go with the Lone Ranger.

Verklarte Nacht is beautiful late Romantic music that I would imagine to be fun for accomplished string instrumentalists to play. I never learned enough to follow or appreciate Schoenberg's later development of atonal and 12-tone, serial music, but I have always liked Verklarte Nacht, which showed that he could write in the late Romantic idiom if he chose to do so. I can hardly imagine a better performance. It was a privilege to hear these very best of class musicians, AND-- with no ringtone interruptions as in the Friday near-debacle. The audience, much smaller than for the Abbado-Lupu concerts, was reverent and appreciative, letting the last reverberations die and allowing for a moment of silence before erupting in applause that went on (and on) until violinist Kolja Blacher gave what seemed to me to be a joking "it's bed time" signal and the audience gave up on any encore. Perfection.