Classical album of the week - Mendelssohn: A Midsummer Night's Dream/Tchaikovsky: Manfred Symphony review

The Guardian 80

Lucerne Festival Orchestra / Chailly
Accentus Music, DVD

In 2015, it was announced that Riccardo Chailly would become music director of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, succeeding Claudio Abbado, who had died the previous year and had very much created the hand-picked ensemble in his own musical image, conducting it every summer for the last decade of his life.

Chailly took up his post in 2016, with Mahler’s majestic Eighth Symphony, not only in tribute to Abbado, whose assistant he had been at La Scala, Milan in the 1970s, but also to round off the cycle of Mahler symphonies that his predecessor had been assembling with the orchestra, year by year.