NEW YORK – Raphaël Pichon was at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport together with his Ensemble Pygmalion orchestra and refrain on March 12, 2020, catching a aircraft 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 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
“In the course of the evening they closed the skies,” the conductor stated.
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 feel he’s actually the way forward for classical music,” stated James Roe, the St. Luke’s orchestra president. “He sees the potential of the live performance expertise in a manner that’s each expansive and welcoming and of the following technology. And he desires the live shows to suggest a narrative, a story, an odyssey, a manner of transferring an viewers member from their on a regular basis life to one thing terribly pleasurable.”
Rowe 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 feel, sadly, the stage director was in a really, very unhealthy temper and a really troublesome second of his life, and, sadly, the results have been huge,” Pichon stated.
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.
“Typically 100% of the orchestra is altering from one evening to the following evening, so it may create some improbable nights and a few actually banal moments, so it’s actually unusual,” Pichon stated. “I’m undecided it’s actually music, however an incredible expertise. Realized so much. By no means once more. You perceive many issues about Salzburg, about Austrian tradition, about Viennese tradition, their position on this classical music world. It’s actually one thing, however it’s a very unusual philosophy. Vienna Philharmoniker — it’s a society inside a society. It’s a very unusual world.”
Alex Fortes, a St. Luke’s violin participant, stated Pichon made a right away constructive impression this week.
“He has each an unbelievable readability and a bodily motion when it comes to speaking what he desires,” Fortes stated, “in addition to extremely eloquent and exact language to explain these issues fairly figuratively and superbly that encourage 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 follow with.
Gerhaher first encountered Devieilhe once they sang collectively at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera final summer time.
“She was simply completely excellent and superb and I believed, effectively, her husband have to be equally sensible. In any other case they will’t keep collectively,” Gerhaher stated with amusing.
Pichon based Pygmalion in 2006. It performs 60-70 live shows per yr, 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 only a bit drained with all these operas telling us (about) the tip of the world and I wished one thing actually completely different and extra corrosive and extra comedian and extra sarcastic,” Pichon stated.
Whereas he’s a Baroque specialist, he has listened to the British rock band Radiohead for twenty years.
“There are numerous parallels with classical music, as a result of I’m actually so amazed by their capacity to erase what they’ve simply completed and attempt to discover every time a brand new world,” Pichon stated.
He led the St. Luke’s orchestra on Monday for a rehearsal at The DiMenna Heart 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’re making is the largest distinction from the climate we skilled exterior,” Fortes recalled Pichon saying. “It’s full of heat and fireplace and wonder.”
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