Andris Nelsons conducts a 100% Brahms program — With Sara Mingardo

Andris Nelsons conducts the inaugural concert of the 2014 Lucerne Festival featuring a program that brings to the fore the many facets of Brahms’s orchestral music. Travel into the composer’s fascinating oeuvre that sits on the edge between Romanticism and modernism!

The festival orchestra opens with his Serenade No. 2 dedicated to Clara Schumann. The work is unique in its genre, with an extremely limited role for the violins. The primarily baroque opera singer Sara Mingardo lends her scintillating voice to Brahms’s Rhapsody for Alto. Composed as a wedding present for Julie Schumann, the daughter of his friends Robert and Clara, the work is inspired by a poem by Goethe. Then, Andris Nelsons presents a passionate reading of the Second Symphony, a work more joyous than the First that has been incredibly popular since its premiere.