Riccardo Chailly, who was born in 1953 in Milan, studied at the Conservatories of Perugia, Rome, and Milan and at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana and began his career as an assistant to Claudio Abbado at La Scala in Milan. Chailly was appointed Music Director of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1980, and in 1988 he moved to the same position with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, which he helmed for 16 years. From 2005 to the summer of 2016, Riccardo Chailly served as head of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He has been Music Director of La Scala in Milan since January 2015 and, since 2016, of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra. Chailly regularly conducts such leading European orchestras as the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestre de Paris. In the United States, he has worked with the New York Philharmonic, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. As an opera conductor – in addition to his performances at La Scala – he has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Royal Opera House in London, Zurich Opera, the Bavarian and Vienna Staatsoper companies, Chicago Lyric Opera, and San Francisco Opera. Riccardo Chailly has received many prizes for his more than 150 CDs, including two Echo Klassik Awards (in 2012 and 2015); Gramophone magazine named his account of the Brahms symphonies Record of the Year in 2014. Riccardo Chailly is a Grand’Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, a Cavaliere di Gran Croce, and a Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion. In 1996 he was made an Honourary Member of the Royal Academy of Music in London, and in France he has been an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres since 2011.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on September 7^th 1988 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam in a programme of works by Wagner, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky.

The summer of 2003 saw the birth of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which was founded by the Italian conductor Claudio Abbado and the Festival’s Executive and Artistic Director Michael Haefliger. They established a link with the legendary "elite orchestra” for which Arturo Toscanini assembled acclaimed virtuosos of his time to create a magnificent ensemble, introducing it in a “Concert de Gala” in 1938, the year of the Festival’s founding. Abbado served as Music Director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra up until his death in January 2014. Riccardo Chailly, who was appointed his successor, has since extended his contract until 2023. The orchestra comprises internationally acclaimed principals, chamber musicians, and music teachers, as well as members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Filarmonica della Scala. At the 2019 Summer Festival, Chailly is conducting them in three different programmes that feature works by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler; the Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts a fourth appearance by the orchestra, with music by Beethoven and Shostakovich. Many of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra’s performances over the last decade have been broadcast on television and then released on DVD or CD; these have garnered such awards as the Diapason d’Or, the BBC Music Magazine Award, and the International Classical Music Award. Their most-recent releases include a live DVD recording of last year’s all-Ravel program, which appeared in April 2019, and a CD of orchestral works by Richard Strauss that came out in July. The LUCERNE FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA has previously toured to many of the musical metropolises in Europe, as well as to New York, Tokyo, and Beijing. In the fall of 2019, the musicians will undertake their second residency in Shanghai, with additional concerts planned in Shenzhen, Beijing, and Milan.

The Lucerne Festival Orchestra has been performing every year at the Summer Festival since its inaugural concerts in the summer of 2003; its most recent appearance here was on August 22^nd 2019 in a programme of works by Beethoven and Shostakovich under Yannick Nézet-Séguin.