Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO)

The Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra and their designated musical director Jörg Widmann bring an intensely impactful work to the Musikfest Berlin: Tutuguri by the young Wolfgang Rihm. The ritual Tutugúri dances of the indigenous peoples of northern Mexico are brought to life with a powerful battery of percussion. The “fevered pulse” of the eponymous poem by Antonin Artaud – who had personally experienced the cult of the Black Sun – is transformed by Rihm into captivating music.

Tutuguri remains an exceptional phenomenon within Wolfgang Rihm’s highly prolific body of works. There is no other work by the composer who died in 2024 which unleashes such unruly elemental forces, and nowhere else do we see rhythm and the awe-inspiring use of percussion as the core focus of a work as in this score in which the final section is performed solely by the six percussionists and amplified choir on tape. 

Rihm’s poème dansé is based on Antonin Artaud’s only radio play Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu [For an end to the judgement of God], his radical reckoning with society, the church and psychiatric hospitals where Artaud was incarcerated for nine years. In this radiophonic piece, the dramatist reveals his concept “theatre of cruelty” intended to evoke existential borderline experiences. His poem on the ritual dances of the Tarahumaras should not become effective merely through the medium of the spoken word: “Everything must be brought precisely into furious order” according to Artaud. And Rihm’s music is indeed in a variety of ways “equally present in every section and every note. It was the text which brought forth this music – a ritualistic image of diverging energies.”

The Lucerne Festival Academy orchestra of excellence devotes its concert to Wolfgang Rihm, who shaped this master school for contemporary music as its artistic director from 2016 until his death. Jörg Widmann will be appointed as new artistic director in 2026.

Tickets: €15 - 69