Music box ... members of the Lucerne Festival orchestra playing in the concert hall of Lucerne's Culture and Congress Centre. Photograph: Urs Flueeler/AP
Lucerne is a lilliputian Swiss city with enormous cultural ambition. With a population of just 50,000, it boasts grand civic architecture, handsome streets free of chain stores, and a lakeside setting overlooked by snow-capped Alpine peaks. You can reach these, and Heidi-style meadows, in just minutes from the city centre by train and cable-car.
In fact it rather seems as if an entire major city has been squeezed into a space small enough for visitors to walk from one side to the other in about 20 minutes without being shortchanged on anything which civic culture or nature at its most sublime can offer. Here are museums, churches, hotels and restaurants of the highest calibre. There are very, very few discordant notes. And there, next to the main railway station and framing views of the lake and its, genuine, paddle-steamers is the vaultingly ambitious Culture and Congress Centre designed by the distinguished Parisian architect, Jean Nouvel.
Within its adventurous walls are the finest new concert halls in the world, the acoustics of which are as justifiably world famous as the perfectly balanced exterior. Completed in 1998, the main hall features an adjustable reverberation chamber and movable canopy, ensuring that everything from string quartets to full-blown orchestras and rock bands are heard to optimum effect. I recently sat through a performance of Verdi's Requiem, a quasi-operatic adventure that explores the ranges of choir, orchestra and soloists to the full; now so quiet that you could almost hear the movements of Mariss Jansons's baton, now so loud that it seemed the orchestra and choir might blow Nouvel's walls away.
Founded by the conductor Arturo Toscanini in 1938, the annual Lucerne Festival proves that a city much smaller than many provincial English towns can host a cultural event to rival anything put on in London, New York or Berlin. Some of the most ambitious orchestral music was written and performed in the city, even before the advent of the Festival. Richard Wagner lived beside the lake at Lucerne from 1866 to 1872, working on Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. And, it was on the steps of his villa at Tribschen - now the Wagner Museum - that he conducted the premiere of The Siegfried Idyll, a haunting piece written for his wife Cosima, and played under her bedroom window on Christmas morning, 1870.
The range of performances at Lucerne today is appropriately Alpine in range, climate and scale. This summer festival's programme includes, among many old favourites, no fewer than 16 premieres from contemporary composers, among them Klaus Huber, Heinz Holliger and Beat Furrer. Pierre Boulez, meanwhile, will hold an "academy" of young musicians focused on avant-garde vocal works.
In the autumn, the festival returns for a week of recitals by some of the world's greatest pianists, among them Evgeny Kissin, Hélène Grimaud and Alfred Brendel. And beyond Nouvel's walls, every form of jazz, stride, boogie-woogie, blues and soul will be hammered out in the city's bars. So if you're planning your next Swiss sojourn, don't expect an aural wallpaper of cuckoo clocks, cow bells, and chocolate wrappers rustling gently in the Alpine breeze - the grandeur of Lucerne music is easily a match for its mountains.
· The Lucerne summer festival runs from August 10 to September 17 and the piano week from November 20 to November 26
