Music is serious business. Or is it? Michael Haefliger, Executive and Artistic Director of the Lucerne Festival, finds the humor in serious music in the 2015 Lucerne Festival In Summer: Humor. The Festival explores the many ways composers of every era have interpreted the theme: through shifting temperaments and moods, through the wit of ingenious ideas and thought-provoking punch lines, through satire, parody, and elements of the grotesque. The idea plays out with many laughs across a great array of music, artists, orchestras and events in Europe’s most interesting summer musical destination, August 14 – September 13. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Bernard Heitink, Andris Nelsons, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Artiste Étoile Isabelle Faust, Composers-in-Residence Tod Machover and Jürg Wyttenbach, Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra with Daniel Harding, the Israel Philharmonic with Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony with Michael Tilson Thomas, a universe of soloists, the enlightening endeavors of the Lucerne Festival Academy with Matthias Pintscher and Pablo Heras-Casado, and an appropriately outside-the-box “Day for Pierre Boulez.” And that’s just a tickle of the levity, beauty, depth, drama, and majesty of this summer’s Lucerne Festival.