François-René Martin

For years, *The Magic Flute* has been one of the most frequently performed operas at the Aix-en-Provence Festival. After an eight-year absence, Mozart’s work is now back on the programme. Clément Cogitore interprets the plot as a modern coming-of-age story: Tamino and Pamina leave the world of childhood behind and enter a reality in which beauty is fragile and truth is uncertain.

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A musical and visual account of the life and exceptional and immortal work of the French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937).

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At Berlin’s Funkhaus, virtuoso pianist Alexandre Kantorow and star soprano Regula Mühlemann dazzle in this stunning program featuring Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 alongside Teodor Currentzis and his renowned Utopia Orchestra.

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The closing concert of La Folle Journée de Nantes, galvanized by the ebb and flow of the Volga, Mississippi, and Moldau rivers. The program features works by Maria Bach, Franz Schubert, Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, and Bedrich Smetana.

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Under the patronage of Her Serene Highness Princess Stéphanie of Monaco The 47th edition of the Monte-Carlo International Circus Festival once again brings together the world's elite circus performers under the famous Monegasque big top. The famous Chinese bicycle acrobats will present a brand new act, rich in technical prowess and synchronization, never before seen in a circus ring. Filmed from January 17 to 21, 2025, at the Espace Fontvieille big top in Monaco.

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The Pygmalion Ensemble, led by conductor and countertenor Raphaël Pichon, is renowned for its refined sound on period instruments. Together with vocal stars Sabine Devieilhe, Lea Desandre, Johannes Martin Kränzle, Julian Prégardien, and Daniel Behle, the ensemble delves into rarely performed works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

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The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performed for the first time in its history at the Palais Garnier on May 11, 2025. A centuries-old institution, this orchestra has been the embodiment of musical excellence in Europe and around the world for more than 180 years.

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Raphaël Pichon, Pygmalion and Sabine Devieilhe celebrate Bach and love in the very church where the composer married his first wife, Maria Barbara. Program : J. S. Bach - Aria 1 de la cantate « Weichet nur betrübte Schatten » BWV 202

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Live from Nantes, a dazzling musical journey between Paris and Vienna. On the program: works by Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Schubert, Johann Strauss II (transcribed by Schoenberg), and Saint-Saëns.

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Conductors Andris Nelsons, Klaus Mäkelä, Riccardo Chailly, and Petr Popelka will take turns conducting the four movements of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. This concert event celebrates the bicentennial of the premiere of Beethoven's masterpiece.

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Raphaël Pichon and the Pygmalion ensemble join forces with a magnificent vocal ensemble to perform Johann Sebastian Bach's cantata Actus Tragicus, set to a work by Johann Michael Bach. Program : Johann Michael Bach - Unser Leben ist siebenzig Jahre Jean-Sébastien Bach - Cantate Actus Tragicus BWV 106 (extraits)

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For their final concert on Les Chemins de Bach, Raphaël Pichon and the Pygmalion ensemble perform Bach's short masses and motets in Arnstadt's Bachkirche.

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Raphaël Pichon and the Pygmalion Ensemble in concert in Arnstadt's Oberkirche, Johann Sebastian Bach's ancestral church.

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The grand closing concert of the 2024 edition of the Nantes classical music festival. The programme includes Dvorak's ‘Slavonic Dance’, Pablo de Sarasate's ‘Bohemian Airs’ and the first movement of Tchaikovsky's ‘Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1’. Also excerpts from works by Chopin, Albéniz, Mascagni, Puccini and Sibelius.

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Theater director Thomas Ostermeier stages Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's timelessly magnificent "Threepenny Opera" with the ensemble of the Comédie Française in Aix-en-Provence, based on a new translation of the original text by Alexandre Pateau. In London's underworld district of Soho, the beggar king Jonathan Peachum and the criminal Macheath, known as Mackie Messer, are at war. The latter also seduces the daughter of the shady "businessman". When he finds out that the two have secretly celebrated a wedding, he decides to get rid of his rival. He is aided in his endeavors by Jenny, a cunning whore who betrays her ex-lover to the police. Back to the original: First performed in 1928, the opera parody strings together one biting musical number after another in cabaret style and jazz rhythm, breaking the boundaries of the genre, which until then had been considered bourgeois. Because the "Threepenny Opera" by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill is clearly political!

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Opera in three acts by Christoph Willibald Gluck, Hector Berlioz's version (1859)

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In February 1972, the American president Richard Nixon went to China to meet Mao Zedong. In the context of the war in Vietnam and the cold war, this encounter marked a turning point in Chinese‑American relations. John Adams, a major musical figure of the last forty years, made this event of contemporary history the subject of his first opera. Nixon in China tackles the political thaw instigated by ping-pong diplomacy, begun by the invitation of the American table tennis players by their Chinese counterparts, one year before the presidential visit. A mesmerising work in which the pulsations and repetitions typical of minimalism are combined with melodic lines of great lyricism. For its entry into the Paris Opera repertoire, this work has been entrusted to the director Valentina Carrasco, who underlines the importance and the mediating power of Chinese national sport in history.

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Salome, princess of Judea, the daughter‑in‑law of King Herod, finds life in her father‑in‑law’s palace dreary. Her curiosity is roused when she hears the voice of Jochanaan, a prophet held prisoner by Herod who is afraid of him. Obsessed by this enigmatic and virtuous man, Salome is ready to do anything to possess him, dead or alive. Drawing on Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play of the same name, in 1905 Richard Strauss produced the work that was to ensure his status as Wagner’s successor in the history of German opera. A dazzling hour and forty minutes, decadent in its very essence, which, for her debut at the Paris Opera, Lydia Steier treats as a dystopia in which amorality rules.

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Utopia, the new orchestra of conductor Teodor Currentzis, can be experienced for the first time in Vienna on its inaugural tour with the 1945 version of Igor Stravinsky’s ‘The Firebird’ and Maurice Ravel’s Suite No. 2 of ‘Daphnis et Chloé’, ‘La Valse’ and ‘Boléro’.

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Step onto the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet alongside superstar soprano Renée Fleming in Renée Fleming's Cities That Sing: Paris. Tenor Piotr Beczała and performers Axelle Fanyo and Alexandre Duhamel join an exquisite cinematic journey into the sights, sounds, and history of the City of Lights.

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Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Platée is a masterpiece of the French operatic repertoire and was highly regarded by critics during the composer’s lifetime. Composed for the marriage of the Dauphin Louis, son of Louis XV, to the Infanta Maria Teresa of Spain, it was first performed at Versailles in 1745 and became an instant hit. The plot revolves around the ugly and conceited frog Platée, the victim of a machination of the gods who make her believe that she is loved by Jupiter. Is this Rameau mocking Princess Maria Teresa of Spain – reputedly a woman of little beauty? Or the French court, which saw itself as a new Olympus? This classic production from the Opéra national de Paris by Marc Minkowski and Laurent Pelly returns to the stage with an entirely new cast, featuring Julie Fuchs, Mathias Vidal, Jean Teitgen and Lawrence Brownlee in the title-role.

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Raphaël Pichon and his Ensemble Pygmalion resonate with the humanity, hope and light that permeate Johann Sebastian Bach's most beautiful sacred scores. A concert full of emotion.

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Clément Cogitore adapts a short ballet excerpt from Jean-Philippe Rameau's Les Indes galantes, with the help of a group of Krump dancers and three choreographers on the 3rd Stage of the Paris Opera: Bintou Dembele, Igor Caruge, and Brahim Rachiki. Krump is a dance style that originated in the ghettos of Los Angeles in the 1990s. It emerged as a result of the riots and brutal police repression that followed the beating of Rodney King.

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This film captures Rattle's very first performance as Music Director; a programme in which British composers took centre-stage. The world-premiere of Helen Grime's Fanfares, which became the first movement of the work Woven Space, opened the concert before violinist Christian Tetzlaff took to the stage to perform the concerto written for him in 2010 by Harrison Birtwistle. Two more works close to Rattle's heart followed: Thomas Adès' Asyla and the pocket-sized Symphony No 3 by the late Oliver Knussen. Finally, Rattle's stunning interpretation of the Enigma Variations brought the concert to a close and then the audience to its feet, filling the Barbican Hall with rapturous applause.

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Romeo Castellucci interpretation of Mozart's final work.

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Guiseppe Verdi’s Requiem is still heard mainly in theatre and concert halls. However, the author himself intended this composition to be performed in church, and on special occasions. Conducted by Teodor Currentzis and performed by soloists and musicAeterna choir and orchestra, Verdi’s famous funeral mass returns from the concert stage to Milan’s Church of San Marco, the same place where it was premiered in 1874. The seven parts of the Requiem become steps on the way to comprehending the sacrament of death, the operatic character of orchestral and vocal writing acquires the strictness of the Catholic tradition, and musical images of rage, despair, and rebellion against the inevitable end are crowned with appeasement.

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Newman's poem tells the story of a soul's journey through death, and provides a meditation on the unseen world of Roman Catholic theology. Gerontius (a name derived from the Greek word geron, "old man") is a devout Everyman. Elgar's setting uses most of the text of the first part of the poem, which takes place on Earth, but omits many of the more meditative sections of the much longer, otherworldly second part, tightening the narrative flow.

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The year 2019 marks the 350th year of existence of the Opéra de Paris, and the Opéra national is staging two exceptional shows at the Palais Garnier in the form of an inaugural gala. Under the direction of Dan Ettinger, the principal dancers, soloists, corps de ballet and orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris will perform extracts from famous ballets as well as some of the most popular opera arias. Soprano Sonya Yoncheva, tenor Bryan Hymel and baritone Ludovic Tézier are among the headliners. A magical experience!

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Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO are joined by revered French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard in a concert film that brings together music by Anton Bruckner and Olivier Messiaen: two composers as united in their devotion to the Catholic faith as they are divergent in their approaches to writing music.

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Recorded in January 2016, this beautiful programme of French music was chosen by Music Director Designate Sir Simon Rattle and features world class soloists Leonidas Kavakos and Julia Bullock.

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