The amazing work of Lucerne Festival‘s Academy, focused on contemporary music, was on full display at Saturday morning’s concert featuring the incomparable Claire Chase, who joined members of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO) led by Vimbayi Kaziboni for the first Swiss performance of Chaya Czernowin‘s ‘The Divine Thawing of the Core’, which she premiered last month.

Czernowin’s gripping response to the political turmoil of the last several years in her native Israel, which she metaphorically imagines as ‘the forced thawing of a democratic society into a theocracy’ – hence the ironic title – ‘Divine Thawing’ is a substantial, 53-minute work for contrabass flute and an ensemble of six flutes, six oboes, six trumpets, trombone, tuba, percussion, piano, and three cellos. More than expressing pain, Czernowin’s astonishing score enacts it, with a devastating, claustrophobic sense of helplessness that presses on you like a physical weight. Rarely have triads sounded so terrifying.

‘It is a very elemental, naked and maybe an intimate beginning,’ remarks the composer, ‘which is forced to melt away through irony into an elemental brutality, in an uneven process, which includes a demonic waltz, in a gradual thawing of its features into a kind of a wholly different way of expression which is more coherent, ceremonial and brutally primitive.’

Chase’s contrabass flute anchored ‘Divine Thawing’ with an uncanny blend of ferocity and vulnerability. With her intense breaths woven into the texture, she seemed to live every extreme of Czernowin’s score, conveying its sense of struggle and resistance and raw endurance. A stunning performance.

Czernowin’s work also reflects her deep admiration of Galina Ustvolskaya‘s Symphony No. 2 from 1979 (‘True and Eternal Bliss!’), which was performed immediately preceding ‘Divine Thawing’, with Stefan Jovanovic as the reciter. The incredible originality of this music made a tremendous impact, uncompromisingly fierce, under Kaziboni’s guidance. The LFCO musicians are truly fearless.

Opening the program were the stark sonorities of Sofia Gubaidulina’s Trio for Three Trumpets from 1976, which summoned the audience into the unfamiliar terrain of the rest of the concert with a magnetic incantation.