Migros-Culture-Percentage-Classics 180°

The musicians of the special music ensemble “Les Siècles” play any repertoire on the appropriate historical instruments, placing several centuries of musical creation in a relevant and unexpected context. In order to pass on their passion for classical music to as many people as possible, the musicians have been organising regular educational activities in schools, hospitals and prisons since the orchestra was founded in 2003. They also carry out numerous orchestra academy projects. The ensemble is based at the Atelier Lyrique de Tourcoing, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Département of Aisne and the Hauts-de-France region. Since 2018, “Les Siècles” has been recording for the harmonia mundi label, and is currently recording the complete orchestral music of Ravel, Debussy and Berlioz. The orchestra has also embarked on a cycle of works by Mahler and the Second Viennese School.

With Ustina Dubitsky, another representative of the young generation of female conductors is entering the international concert stage. Growing up in Munich, she first played the violin and was concertmaster in various youth orchestras. After studying conducting in Weimar and Zurich, she decided to pursue this path consistently – and with success. In 2022, she won the orchestra prize at the “La Maestra” conducting competition in Paris, and in the same year she was appointed assistant to François-Xavier Roth at the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne. Since then, Dubitsky has conducted major orchestras such as the Orchestre de Paris, the Dresden Philharmonic and the Ensemble Modern. In 2024 she made her debut at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich with the operas “Lucrezia” and “Der Mond”.

“A delight from start to finish” was how the magazine “The Strad” described an Offenbach recording with the French cellist Xavier Phillips. In addition to this excursion into the lighter genre, the Parisian-born musician also has a talent for the difficult and profound, as his CDs with works by Schnittke, Shostakovich and Brahms demonstrate; his recording of Dutilleux's Cello Concerto was even nominated for a Grammy. Among his supporters was none other than Mstislav Rostropovich, who left the solo part to his student during many joint performances. Phillips plays an instrument made by the legendary Matteo Gofriller in 1710.

The French artist Grégoire Pont found his personal form of expression early on. At the age of eight, he attended an animation workshop in Paris and has since devoted himself entirely to drawing. After graduating from the Penninghen School of Art in 1992, he developed his own concept Cinesthetics, in which he creates live illustrations to a musical performance, for example to works by Ravel, Saint-Saëns or Debussy. His aim: to make classical music accessible to inexperienced listeners. Pont has since worked with conductors such as Kent Nagano and has appeared in a number of opera productions.

There are as many settings of poems as there are grains of sand on the seashore, and orchestral versions of lieder are also common. But it is a rare occurrence for a two-minute song to be transformed into a symphonic poem four times as long. This is what happened in the case of Camille Saint-Saëns' “Danse macabre”: the composer took the original version for voice and piano and created something completely new, a demonic, colourful dance of death for orchestra in which the xylophone clatters the skeletons and a solo violin embodies the Grim Reaper. This ghostly dance is so vivid that the absence of the poem is not at all noticeable.

A concerto in a single movement? With his Cello Concerto in A minor, the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns once again surprised both experts and audiences. In what was only his sixth solo concerto, he set himself the task of expanding the classical formal language. His solution was as surprising as it was plausible: an expansive sonata movement interrupted at a key point by a solemn minuet. This concept not only convinced the critics, but also gave the work an elegant French touch shortly after the lost war against Germany.

Charles Perrault is to France what the Brothers Grimm are to the German-speaking world. As early as 1697, Perrault published a collection of fairy tales and legends that he called “Tales of My Mother the Goose”. This title was adopted by Maurice Ravel when he compiled five piano pieces for children in 1910, based on fairy tales such as “Sleeping Beauty” and “Little Thumb”. His music, a very unique sound world of crystalline beauty, was so well received that he created an orchestral version of it. And that was not the end of the secondary use either, because the following year Ravel expanded the small cycle into a ballet score.

“My intention was to compose a large musical fresco, less concerned with archaism than with remaining true to the Greece of my dreams,” said Maurice Ravel about his most extensive work, the ballet “Daphnis et Chloé”, which premiered in 1912. His music follows the action on stage, which revolves around a pair of ancient shepherds who lose and then find each other. But above all, it is a magically evocative sound conjuring up a fictitious world in which the external (feelings, erotic tension) and internal (the famous sunrise vision) merge. The work has been adapted into two orchestral suites, the second of which is the more popular.