Despite the failure of “Air”, a creation by British composer Thomas Adès for violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, the music of the 21st century is a distinguished guest on the shores of Lake Lucerne.

Full house for contemporary music at the Lucerne Festival, this Tuesday, August 30. The morning started beautifully in the small gray auditorium of the Hochschule Luzern, the Salquin Hall, which hosts the research assembly – violinist Melise Mellinger, violist Geneviève Strosser, cellist Asa Akerberg, clarinettist Shizuyo Oka and pianist Klaus Steffes-Hollander.

A program essentially devoted to composers of Germanic origin. What the Swedish Lisa Streich (born in 1985) is not quite, despite her studies in Berlin, Salzburg and Cologne, and her piece for clarinet and string trio, Nebensonnen, created in 2015 on the occasion of the 80 years of Helmut Lachenmann, tutelary figure present in the room.

The title – Les Trois Soleils – refers to the penultimate of the twenty-four lieder of Schubert’s Winterreise, an antechamber to madness and loneliness.

The music deploys a nebulous orb, slow harmonics of strings, blurred sounds of the clarinet, pierced here and there by the painful dissonance of stridulating high notes, melting the four instruments into an ardent, unbearable sound, like a laser beam.

Very moving, the quivering little final melody played by the violin and the viola, back to back, a mock quotation and farewell. It is precisely the mention « Mes adieux » that Helmut Lachenmann attached to his second Streichtrio (string trio), performed in world premiere on May 8, before being given in Paris on June 18 as part of the ManiFeste festival.