2017 Easter Festival | 1 to 9 April 2017 Teodor Currentzis is artist-in-residence Swiss premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s -Strophen in the räsonanz series with the Bavarian Radio Symphony and Choir and Mariss Jansons Staged performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers in the Jesuitenkirche Lucerne, 21 October 2016. This coming spring, the Easter Festival will again present concerts in Lu- cerne’s churches and in the KKL Luzern. As artist-in-residence, Teodor Currentzis will lead his ensem- ble musicAeterna in two concerts in the KKL Luzern. The first one will include Mozart's earlier G minor Symphony, Beethoven’s Sinfonia eroica, and Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 4 in D major featuring solo- ist , “artiste étoile” for the summer of 2017. For his second program, Currentzis will pair Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater with the original orchestral version of Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross. Before that, the Easter Festival will open in Lucerne’s churches, with the soprano Julia Lezhneva and the ensemble La Voce Strumentale under Dmitry Sinkovsky kicking things off on 1 April in an all-Ba- roque program in the Hofkirche. On 2 April works by J.S. Bach, Poulenc, and Messiaen will be heard in the Franziskanerkirche and, on April 3, Monteverdi’s Vespers in the Jesuitenkirche. The Monteverdi program is a coproduction of Lucerne Festival and the Luzerner Theater with the Theater’s opera and dance ensembles and Les Passions de l’Ame, for which the church space will be transformed into a walk-on stage. Monteverdi will be a continuing focus for the summer of 2017, when all three of the composer’s surviving operas are on the program. On 4 April ’s dramatic legend Nicolas de Flue, featuring the Academy choir and musicians from the Hochschule Luzern, will be performed in the church hall at the MaiHof to mark the 600th anniversary of the birth of “Brother Klaus,” the Swiss patron St. Niklaus von Flüe. Wolfgang Rihm’s grand choral work Requiem-Strophen will be a highlight of the festival and will be performed on 8 April by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir under the direction of Mariss Jansons in a räsonanz Foundation concert, an initiative of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foun- dation, in cooperation with Lucerne Festival and Bavarian Radio’s musica viva. The soloists for this Swiss premiere will include Anna Prohaska, Mojca Erdmann, and Hanno Müller-Brachmann. For the second concert of their residency, Mariss Jansons and his orchestra will play Prokofiev’s Symphonie classique and Sibelius’ Second Symphony, along with Mozart's Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major, K. 482, with Emanuel Ax. For Lucerne Festival Young, the composer Mike Svoboda will present the family concert Once Around the World for listeners aged 7 and up; this is a commission from Lucerne Festival, featuring an ensemble of the Lucerne Festival Alumni – and Svoboda himself as narrator and conductor. On 6 April Thomas Hengelbrock will lead the Balthasar Neumann Choir and Ensemble and the so- loists Daniel Behle and Markus Butter in a performance of the J.S Bach’s St. John Passion, using the rarely heard second version from 1725. The master class in will give young conductors an opportunity for the seventh year in a row to benefit from the wisdom and experience of Bernard Haitink and to work with the Festival Strings Lucerne. Information about how to buy tickets at www.lucernefestival.ch Main Sponsor – Zurich Insurance Company Ltd Contacts for Press and Public Relations Nina Steinhart, Head of PR | [email protected] | +41 (0)41 226 44 43 Katharina Schillen | [email protected] | +41 (0)41 226 44 59