In a world where the arts are beginning to depend more and more on government subsidies and business institutions for their income, it is refreshing to come across a private patron of music like Paul Sacher, the Swiss musician, teacher, and benefactor. Not only has Sacher shown taste in his encouragement of contemporary composers for more than half a century, dispensing generously of his private fortune in support of new music, he has also proved sufficiently gifted as a conductor to be an active campaigner on the concert platform for the works he has commissioned.
It was fitting therefore that Sacher's eightieth birthday should be celebrated by the Lucerne Festival-one of Europe's premier music festivals-with a concert conducted by Sacher himself, featuring some of the music with which he Conductor Paul Sacher has helped to enrich twentieth century musical culture. There of course have been other tributes to Sacher this year in several of Europe's principal musical centers, especially Basle, his home city, where he founded the Basle Chamber Orchestra as a twenty-year-old student and has now opened a permanent archive to house his unique collection of manuscript scores, compositional sketches, and composers' letters.
But the reputation of the Lucerne Festival as an annual showcase for the world's great conductors, composers, and orchestras, together with Sacher's own historic links with the festival, gave his participation at this year's event a special significance. Since 1944, Sacher has given two outdoor festival concerts annually at the Lion Monument, a picturesque lake-and rockface venue with a striking natural acoustic. This year was no exception: the program, as usual, was confined to Mozart, with Sacher conducting the Collegium Musicum of Zurich. But the real connoisseur's evening came several days later in the Kunsthaus, Lucerne's squat and rather humble concert hall, where most of the events for the three-week festival take place.
For this concert, the Philharmonia Orchestra had flown over from London for a demanding program of Bartok, Lutoslawski, and Honegger. The festival organizers could not, of course, hope to encompass anything more than a tiny fraction of Sacher's special interests: no Stravinsky, for example, whose estate Sacher bought for more than $5 million in 1983; no Webern, Maderna, Martin, or Britten, who all enjoyed Sacher's patronage in their lifetime; and no Berio or Boulez, who have already pledged to the Sacher Foundation all their completed manuscript scores. But the three works that made up the concert succeeded in providing a picture of the breadth of Sacher's interests and the debt that twentieth-century music owes him.
Bartok was represented by his Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, which was commissioned Sacher in 1936 and first performed at a Basle Chamber Orchestra concert in January 1937, three years before Bartok emigrated from Hungary to the United States. In the intervening years, the composition has achieved the status of a twentieth-century classic. This festival performance justified the way in which the work is regarded.
Sacher's virtue as a conductor of modern music has always been founded in his desire for absolute fidelity to the composer and his refusal to judge or get in the way of the music. In spite of a rather overbearing beat, he offers a refreshingly down-to-earth approach to interpretation. So it was instructive to find the string textures of
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