Wolfgang Rihm: Tutuguri
Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra & Jörg Widmann

The very first concert of the Lucerne Festival Academy under its new Artistic Director, Jörg Widmann, was loud, wild, and unrestrained. Anyone who is lulled by the subtle “Poème dansé” to associate Wolfgang Rihm’s Tutuguri with an elegant ballet score in the style of Debussy was in for quite a shock. With explosive brass eruptions, ominously pulsing rhythms, blood-curdling screams, and a final drum barrage from six percussionists lasting about a half hour, Tutuguri  shook the very foundation of the KKL Luzern. Rihm was inspired in the early 1980s by a poem by the French avant-garde theater visionary Antonin Artaud, who half a century earlier had witnessed a peyote ritual among the Tarahumara, an Indigenous people in Mexico, and transformed the experience into literature. The imagery evokes black suns and scorched earth, naked riders and headless horses, archaic rites and fevered hallucinations. Rihm aimed for “music in its raw state”: a “sonic body” whose twitching and transformation become melody, rhythm, and color.