Sun, August 16, 2026
Summer Festival: Lucerne Festival Academy 1

The first concert of the Lucerne Festival Academy under its new artistic director, Jörg Widmann, will be loud, wild, and excessive. Anyone who, misled by the subtitle "Poème dansé," expects elegant ballet music à la Debussy from Wolfgang Rihm's Tutuguri will likely be shocked. With wild eruptions of brass, ominously pulsating rhythms, bloodcurdling screams, and a final, half-hour-long drum barrage from no fewer than six percussionists, Tutuguri will shake the KKL Luzern to its very foundations. Rihm was inspired to create this infernal cacophony in the early 1980s by a poem by the French theater revolutionary Antonin Artaud. Half a century earlier, Artaud had attended a peyote ceremony among the Tarahumara, an indigenous people in Mexico, and transformed this experience into a literary work. It's about black suns and charred earth, naked riders and headless horses, archaic rituals and intoxicating hallucinations. Rihm strove for "music in its raw state": a "sound-body whose twitching and transformation become melody, rhythm, and color."

Program:
5:30 p.m.: Pre-concert talk - Jörg Widmann and Michael Engelhardt in conversation with Mark Sattler (KKL Luzern, Auditorium)

Wolfgang Rihm (1952–2024)
Tutuguri. Poème dansé for large orchestra, percussionists, recorded choir, and narrator, based on the poem Tutuguri from the radio play Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu by Antonin Artaud.

Intermission at approximately 8:00 p.m.

Tickets available from March 24, 2026 | 10:00 AM (CET)