A festival, a forum, an attitude, “Playing On The Edge” showcases curious musicians, artists, thinkers, and audience engaged in deep listening and ingenious collaborations.

Through curated concerts, chamber music house parties, and participative jam sessions, the project seeks to bring friends and communities together around fascinating ideas and great art.

Committed to artistic excellence and new music, the POTE festival showcases artists from the Bourgogne Franche-Comté region, nurtures collaborations between communities and generations.

Szuhwa Wu presents two programs of dynamic explorations of sound possibilities.  Whether performing on period instrument or with interactive technology, Ms. Wu invites audiences to tour uncharted territories by ear and experience sound as a visceral, immersive force.

Founded in 2015, the Quatuor IMPACT consists of four outstanding, creative personalities: Szuhwa Wu, Irène Lecoq, Julia Robert, and Anaïs Moreau.  All four are strongly committed to contemporary and experimental music. The quartet focuses on new music repertoire that breaks downs different genres to develop fresh connections to sound and gesture, liberated from conventional constraints.

Selected former Academy students regularly return to Lucerne as LUCERNE FESTIVAL ALUMNI and enrich the Festival by giving performances in the realm of contemporary music.  They are young, versatile, and eager to experiment. And they are influencing the music world of today and tomorrow.

CHAARTS is "probably the largest string quartet in the world". Founded in 2010 at the Künstlerhaus Boswil (Switzerland), CHAARTS, based on the Claudio Abbados Lucerne Festival Orchestra (revived in 2003), CHAARTS invites members of internationally successful string quartets and chamber ensembles, soloists, concertmasters and solo wind instruments from leading European orchestras.  CHAARTS performed with great success with world famous musicians such as Martha Argerich, Vilde Vrang, Ian Bostridge, Giovanni Sollima, Mischa Maisky, Roby Lakatos, Fazil Say, Regula Mühlemann and the King’s Singers. Since the 2018/19 season, CHAARTS has been working with the former quartet violinist and Gábor Takács-Nagy as its "Primarius". Enthusiasm, narrative joy and sparkling intensity are hallmarks of CHAARTS.  In addition to classical works, from chamber music to symphony, music from pop and rock, tango and world music is interpreted with passion.

The violin and piano Duo Eliot, known for its “fine balance between brilliance and elegance,” offers audiences new entry points for connecting to great art.  Examples include a concert of the works by composers that Proust refers to in In Search of Lost Time interspersed with readings from the text, and a museum concert of works by Janacek, Webern, and Satie surrounded by master paintings of the period.

Featured on French National Radio’s Tapage Nocturne show, the acclaimed electronic chamber music Ensemble Fabrique Nomade is comprised of augmented violin, cello, flute, and the digital instrument Karlax.  With their stream-lined organological and stage setup, the ensemble uses the musicians’ natural movements for unlimited freedom in creation and artistic expression.

Centered around the essays of Michel de Montaigne, an evening of dance, theater, and music that weaves together text and movement, word and step, sentence and choreography.  Solo violin works by Bach, Carter, Lei Liang, Biber, Saariaho, Boulez, Ysaye, and Paganini.

Musical promenades in 6 architecturally significant sights, including villas by Palladio. Compositions and improvisations for violin, trumpet, saxophone and electronics.