Mariss Jansons conducted intense and very detailed rehearsals this week in Switzerland to prepare the Pittsburgh Symphony for its prestigious concerts Thursday through Saturday nights at the Lucerne Festival. All three concerts will be broadcast live throughout Europe, emphasizing the Pittsburgh Symphony’s world-class standing. Jansons and orchestra are in residence at the Lucerne Festival, an honor they’ll share with the Berlin and Vienna philharmonics, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony. Now that’s the big league in classical music. The local musicians arrived in Lucerne midday Sunday after relatively uneventful travel, although their connecting flight from Newark to Europe had to be held for their delayed arrival due to bad weather over New Jersey. In Switzerland, they found normal summer warmth, not the killer heat that has engulfed Europe for weeks. Even so, some musicians at hotels lacking air conditioning transferred to cooler quarters. Violist Paul Silver said Jansons was in a good mood as the musicians got down to work. Tuesday was spent in a large rehearsal room with very dry sound, Silver reported. Moving to the stage of the concert hall on Wednesday helped, because “the sound you make comes back at you a lot more.” The entire tour repertoire — including big symphonies by Gustav Mahler, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Dmitri Shostakovich — was detailed in five rehearsals by Jansons. WQED/FM station manager Jim Cunningham, covering the tour in Europe, said Jansons spent 40 minutes just on the first movement of Bela Bartok’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta.” Cunningham also reported that Jansons said the orchestra played the tricky music very well despite not having performed it since the April European tour. The musicians were briefed on the status of contract negotiations with management at a special meeting Wednesday. Spokesman Zach Smith said that extending the current contract, which would have expired Aug. 31, to Sept. 21 would allow the players to better focus on music making on the tour. He also said Jim Wilkinson, a former symphony board member, had joined the negotiations on management’s side of the table. Monday was a day off for the musicians, after more than 24 hours of travel on Saturday and Sunday. Heading for the mountains on warm days makes sense. Smith led a group up the nearby Mt. Pilatus. After an hour-and-a-half boat trip on Lake Lucerne, the 7,000-foot peak is reached by a cogwheel railroad that is, at 48 degrees incline, the steepest in the world. “By comparison, the Duquesne Incline is a piker,” Smith quipped. Silver took another group on a series of trains to mountains south of Lucerne. They stopped at Kleine Scheidegg, a village seen in the Clint Eastwood film “The Eiger Sanction.” On a previous trip to Lucerne, Silver stayed at the Schidegg hotel featured in the film. “The day was not cloudless, but the clouds were always moving and provided great vistas as we approached the town above the valley of Interlochen (between lakes). There we were still about a mile from the top of the Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau” mountains, he said. The group then traveled more than 9 kilometers in rail cars through tunnels burrowed in the three mountains to reach the world’s highest railway station, at 11,333 feet, at the top of Jungfrau. “There is a complete village up there, with a research science center, the obligatory cafeterias and restaurants,” he said. Being on top of Jungfrau “puts things in perspective for you,” Silver commented. “These mountains have been here for, I assume, millions of years. We could see mountain climbers on the top of Monch — they were four little matchsticks.”

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