In 2027, the lunchtime concert series at the Hotel Schweizerhof Luzern once again offers pianistic discoveries. It opens with Anna Geniushene, who combines virtuosity and spirituality in works by Prokofiev, Verdi, Liszt and Stravinsky. How do new pianists come onto the radar of a piano festival? At Le Piano Symphonique, one path leads throu…

Profoundly exuberant teenage romance Following Sophia Liu, the second lunch concert features another exceptionally young pianist, Tianyao Lyu. She will already be appearing as a soloist in Robert Schumann’s Konzertstück for Piano and Orchestra at the opening concert of Le Piano Symphonique. In the more intimate setting of the Zeugheersaal, …

Virtuosity is a prerequisite for artistic careers – and yet it has something of an image problem. Artist biographies like to invoke the profound musicality of their protagonists, while technical brilliance tends to appear as an incidental extra. The fear is that a musician might be misunderstood as a mere acrobat of the fingers. In Sophia L…