Summer-Festival: Debut Yuki Hirano

She is just 21 years old and has already created a stir on the international stage: born in Sapporo, Japan, Yuki Hirano won the 2024 Vienna Classical Violin Competition at the Classical Violin Olympus and emerged in the spring of 2025 as the winner of the International Jascha Heifetz Competition in Vilnius, where she also received numerous special prizes. The secret to her success? “If the audience can enjoy the music, I’m happy,” says the student of Pavel Vernikov at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna. The program she has chosen for her Lucerne Festival debut offers the ideal conditions for that. There is, for instance, the exhilarating Violin Sonata by Alexey Shor, born in Ukraine in 1970. It was originally a violin concerto, but together with the legendary pianist Mikhail Pletnev, Shor reshaped it into a duo — and scored a genuine hit: folksy, virtuosic, and lush. Szymanowski and Dvořák bring full-blown Romantic warmth, and in the graceful yet dazzling Valse-Caprice that the violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe arranged based on an étude by Saint-Saëns, any remaining restraint goes out the window.

Performers:
Yuki Hirano, violin
Chizu Miyamoto, piano

Program:
Alexey Shor (*1970) / Mikhail Pletnev (*1957)
Violin Sonata in B minor
based on Shor’s Violin Concerto No. 4

Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937)
Violin Sonata in D minor, Op. 9

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
Romantic Pieces, Op. 75

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) / Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931)
Caprice d’après l’Étude en forme de Valse, Op. 52, No. 6

This concert has no intermission.

Tickets from 24.03.2026 | 10.00 am (CET)