The Lucerne Festival is one of the most important music festivals worldwide. Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra have been making regular guest appearances there and to mark the festival's 75th birthday, the orchestra is playing a special programme. In addition to a selection of overtures and preludes composed by this year's two “birthday boys”, Wagner and Verdi, they will play two premieres commissioned specially by the festival and the orchestra for this concert – “the concert marked a milestone, not just for the composers and the musicians, but for the Lucerne Festival itself.” (Deutschlandradio)
In keeping with the orchestra's message of peace and reconciliation, the commission went to two acclaimed composers from Jordan and Israel. Founded in 1999, the orchestra comprises musicians – teenagers and young adults up to the age of 25 – from Israel, the Arab states and Spain, and hence from the Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths, and as an ensemble, they demonstrate the peaceful co-existence that seems to elude the great political minds of today.
“Que la lumière soit” – the French translation of the words of Genesis “Let there be light” – is the title of the work by Jordanian-born Saed Addad and refers to the effort to drive out all ignorance. In her composition “At the Fringe of our Gaze”, Haddad's Israeli colleague Chaya Czernowin seeks to make the unknown familiar in these different cultural and religious worlds.
