NEW YORK (AP) — Raphaël Pichon was at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport together with his Ensemble Pygmalion orchestra and refrain on March 12, 2020, catching a airplane to New York for his U.S. debut 9 days later on the Park Avenue Armory in Monteverdi’s “Marian Vespers.”
First the flight was delayed. Then it was canceled as a result of coronavirus pandemic.
“In the middle of the night they closed the skies,” the conductor mentioned.
His American debut was delayed till December 2021 with Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society. He makes first New York look at age 40 on Thursday evening, main the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in a program with baritone Christian Gerhaher and soprano Ying Fang titled “Mein Traum (My Dream)” that includes works by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Carl Maria von Weber.
“I think he’s really the future of classical music,” mentioned James Roe, the St. Luke’s orchestra president. “He sees the potential of the concert experience in a way that’s both expansive and welcoming and of the next generation. And he wants the concerts to propose a story, a narrative, an odyssey, a way of moving an audience member from their everyday life to something extraordinarily pleasurable.”
Roe first met Pichon on the 2023 Salzburg Competition in Austria, the place Pichon led a brand new manufacturing of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro ” by director Martin Kušej that included cocaine-fueled fights and a predator priest. Pichon’s spouse, soprano Sabine Devieilhe, sang Susanna.
“I think, sadly, the stage director was in a very, very bad mood and a very difficult moment of his life, and, sadly, the consequences were big,” Pichon mentioned.
The Vienna Philharmonic within the pit produced a distinct sound than the leaner strategy Pichon is used to from Pygmalion’s interval devices. Because the Salzburg Competition’s resident orchestra since 1922, the Vienna Philharmonic performs in quite a few operas and live shows.
“Sometimes 100% of the orchestra is changing from one night to the next night, so it could create some fantastic nights and some really banal moments, so it’s really strange,” Pichon mentioned. “I’m not sure it’s really music, but an amazing experience. Learned a lot. Never again. You understand many things about Salzburg, about Austrian culture, about Viennese culture, their role in this classical music world. It’s really something, but it’s a really strange philosophy. Vienna Philharmoniker — it’s a society inside a society. It’s a really strange world.”
Alex Fortes, a St. Luke’s violin participant, mentioned Pichon made a right away optimistic impression this week.
“He has both an incredible clarity and a physical movement in terms of communicating what he wants,” Fortes mentioned, “as well as incredibly eloquent and precise language to describe those things quite figuratively and beautifully that inspire the orchestra.”
Born in Brittany, Pichon performed violin when he was younger, began singing in a choir when he was 10 and gave that up for piano and harpsichord. He met Devieilhe whereas singing in a youth choir. They reside along with their two younger youngsters in Paris’ thirteenth arrondissement, a unit mixed from a number of flats that’s soundproofed, permitting every a piano to apply with.
Gerhaher first encountered Devieilhe once they sang collectively at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera final summer time.
“She was just absolutely outstanding and amazing and I thought, well, her husband must be equally brilliant. Otherwise they can’t stay together,” Gerhaher mentioned with amusing.
Pichon based Pygmalion in 2006. It performs 60-70 live shows per 12 months, together with on the Aix-en-Provence Competition, the Dutch Nationwide Opera and Paris’ Opéra-Comique, the place Pichon performed an opera together with his spouse for the primary time, Léo Delibes’ “Lakmé,” in 2022. Pichon has commissioned a comic book opera from French-Argentine composer Oscar Strasnoy to premiere there in 2027.
“I’m just a bit tired with all these operas telling us (about) the end of the world and I wanted something really different and more corrosive and more comic and more sarcastic,” Pichon mentioned.
Whereas he’s a Baroque specialist, he has listened to the British rock band Radiohead for 20 years.
“There are a lot of parallels with classical music, because I’m really so amazed by their ability to erase what they’ve just done and try to explore each time a new world,” Pichon mentioned.
He led the St. Luke’s orchestra on Monday for a rehearsal at The DiMenna Middle for Classical Music, in a windswept space of Manhattan close to the Hudson River. The harshest chilly snap of the winter had set in.
“The music we are making is the biggest contrast from the weather we experienced outside,” Fortes recalled Pichon saying. “It’s full of warmth and fire and beauty.”
