LUNCH CONCERT WITH ANNA GENIUSHENE

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 through the festival’s connection with the renowned Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. After the 2022 Cliburn winner Yunchan Lim, Anna Geniushene brings another distinctive voice from that competition to Lucerne in 2027: she won the silver medal behind the 18-year-old sensation from South Korea.

The prize brought international attention to a pianist whose debut album had already introduced her through weighty Russian repertoire of the modern and late-Romantic eras. Yet her artistic work extends far beyond a virtuoso career. “As concert pianists, we have devoted our lives to a miracle,” she says. “To stand on stage and enter into dialogue with the music and with myself has something spiritual about it.”

Both dimensions shape the programme with which Anna Geniushene opens the lunch concerts at the Hotel Schweizerhof Luzern. Prokofiev’s Sarcasms and his Fourth Piano Sonata combine sharp contours with inner tension. In the fragments from Stravinsky’s Firebird, infernal virtuosity flares up. This virtuosity merges with the sacred in two famous Liszt paraphrases after operas by Giuseppe Verdi: in the Miserere from Il Trovatore, urgent brilliance releases soulful bel canto from prison-darkness; in the Danza sacra e duetto finale d’Aida, it opens the tomb of Aida and Radamès towards glittering transcendence.