PARIS — On the afternoon of June 9, I was sitting with French composer Éric Tanguy and his wife, the pianist Suzana Bartal, at the Café de la Musique between the Philharmonie de Paris and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Dance de Paris. Every few minutes, a musician walked past with an instrument case or a child with a violin on her back, and Tanguy smiled each time. Bartal, who had recently premiered her husband’s new piano concerto, spoke forcefully about what the French musical ecosystem had given them: the network, the continuity, the sense of belonging to something larger than any single institution. It was the kind of conversation that made the previous eight days suddenly cohere.
I had come to Paris curious about the musical connections between the city and the Orchestre de Paris, in particular, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, because the relationship of these orchestras had recently become more like a slowly unfolding plan than a series of coincidences.
Esa-Pekka Salonen, who shaped the LA Phil for 17 years and has returned as its creative director, takes up the music directorship of the Orchestre de Paris in 2027-28 while also serving as Creativity and Innovation Chair at the Philharmonie de Paris, the orchestra’s home. Gustavo Dudamel, who served as music director of the Paris Opera from 2021 until his resignation in 2023 and last year shared the Orchestre de Paris podium for a gala concert with his friend Klaus Mäkelä, departs the LA Phil this summer for the New York Philharmonic but will be coming back to Los Angelese for substantial chunks of time.
Meanwhile, Klaus Mäkelä, who has built something remarkable with the Orchestre de Paris since his appointment at age 24, relinquishes the music directorship at the end of the 2026-27 season as he assumes dual leadership of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Almost lost in the shuffle, Daniel Harding, whose Orchestre de Paris tenure was curtailed by the pandemic, has just been appointed the LA Phil’s next music director on a six-year contract beginning in 2027-28.
The question for the enterprise will be whether this brilliant LA Phil triumvirate — plus Anna Handler as conductor-in-residence and Paris-based Emmanuelle Haïm as artist collaborator (yet another French connection) — can establish what French orchestras have long had organically: a coherent identity, a continuous sound, and a community that persists beyond any single music director’s tenure, let alone one composed of five as distinctive as these.
On June 2, I heard the Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse at the Philharmonie, its metallic sails gleaming in the sun like those at Disney Hall; they played Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with Alexandre Kantorow as soloist, and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Their new chief conductor, Tarmo Peltokoski — age 25 and Finnish, as many young conductors seem to be these days (think Kristian Sallinen, just signed on at the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra) — was making his Paris debut in his new role. I was told that more than 20 critics were in attendance.
Kantorow’s Beethoven was spontaneous and occasionally willful, indifferent to received ideas about how it should go; he occasionally paused to listen to the resonances from his piano (once even from the piano frame, as if hearing them for the first time and sharing his discoveries in real time. He found deep pools of beauty and impulsive energy in Beethoven’s cadenzas. Peltokoski punctuated the beginning of the Andante so sharply that it seemed to open painful wounds in the lines of Kantorow’s responses. The pianist gathered himself to start off the last movement in a cheery vein and raced to the finish with the orchestra and Peltokoski.
The intensity ratcheted up after intermission for Mahler’s Sixth Symphony. Peltokoski positioned himself on the podium like a junior Prospero facing a wind he himself had summoned, determined to never let it rage entirely out of control. He
placed the Scherzo second, a choice most Mahlerians favor despite the composer’s own ambivalence about the ordering, and one that here maximized the impact of the music’s fury by delaying the Andante’s emotional relief for as long as possible. The Toulouse orchestra, one of the country’s finest, was at its best when he stopped insisting and let them play.
On June 4, the intimate confines of the Salle Cortot, built in 1929, offered music at the scale it was imagined for. Flutist Juliette Hurel and harpist Isabelle Moretti played an all-French 20th-century program to launch their new harmonia mundi CD — Debussy, Ravel, Eugène Bozza, Clémence de Grandval, and Fauré, and a Jean Cras Suite en duo of jeweled, unhurried craftsmanship — for an audience of perhaps 300 people, who hung on every breath.
June 7 brought the kind of synthesis Haïm could unleash in LA, when the CCN-Ballet de Lorraine from Nancy presented “Concerto danzante” at the Philharmonie: two ballets backed by Les Arts Florissants led by the young French violin virtuoso Théotime Langlois de Swarte threading Vivaldi and Bach through two distinct choreographic imaginations. Garbo by Josépha Madoki, a leading French figure in the street dance known as waacking, took the Vivaldi half, using it to generate Baroque concerto rhetoric and employing a flamboyant, often semaphoric vocabulary and outrageous costumes from the golden age of Hollywood.
Maud Le Pladec’s Ad vitam aeternam was more severe and interior. Langlois de Swarte’s ability to deliver the most difficult of Baroque concertos and solo works as if they were being spun off by the composers just for the one occasion was quite extraordinary, and how he and his band managed to sync almost exactly with the dancers without once feeling anything but spontaneous and flexible, for almost two hours, was a miracle.
The ability of Paris to produce such spectacles is what Bartal had been describing at the café, and what American violinist Miclen LaiPang — who found his way into the French ecosystem through the Trio Zadig, recording the Mendelssohn trios for Naïve, while his solo album Deep River has just appeared on Delos to BBC notice — confirmed from his own experience. Jossalyn Jensen is another example of an American in Paris, a former Los Angeles colleague of LaiPang and now principal viola of the Orchestre de chambre de Paris.
The richness of what Paris offered during these 10 days included opera premieres at the major houses, such as a striking new Entführung aus dem Serail at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and a new production of Offenbach’s La Vie parisienne at the Théâtre du Châtelet that opened the day after I left. Beneath the great golden clock at the Musée d’Orsay, I heard cellist Anastasia Kobekina‘s dress rehearsal for the world premiere of Thierry Escaich’s Poème symphonique with the Orchestre de chambre de Paris.
My season in Paris ended the night of June 10 when the Orchestre de Paris concluded their regular season with Sauli Zinovjev’s Taste of Metal, Schumann’s Violin Concerto with Isabelle Faust, and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. Commissioned from the 38-year old Finn, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Oslo and Helsinki Philharmonics, Zinovjev’s symphony is scored for 92 musicians, including six percussionists and the Philharmonie’s organ. Growling, powerful, industrial in its raw energy, inspired by the Brutalist sculptures of Markus Copper and without any visual stimulation or program to follow, it used the orchestra to chisel a narrative that held the audience’s attention for its full 40 minutes with few discernible tunes, and to which they responded with considerable intensity of their own.
The Schumann performance stood in sharp juxtaposition to Faust’s performance with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra three months earlier, which had been fierce, almost ungovernable, her physicality inseparable from the music. As she had in LA, Faust performed with the score before her — not unfamiliarity but fidelity, the customary choice of a violinist who recorded the concerto in 2015. In Paris, Mäkelä, however, surrounded her with warmth where Dinis Sousa had sought electricity. Two entirely valid visions of the same score with very different results. Her encore, a Telemann Fantasia in E minor, completed her total seduction of the audience.
And yet, when they recovered, they still were not prepared for the shock of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. In a city meant for lovers, Mäkelä and the orchestra poured it on in waves of Technicolor sound that Leopold Stokowski would have admired. The audience, the orchestra, the conductor, and the hall itself were complicit in the performance: The strings were led by the glorious playing of Sarah Nemtanu, their new concertmaster since January, and the love theme in the cellos and basses achieved an outpouring of emotion that erased all memories of the thinking that had gone into processing some of the Zinovjev and the Schumann as well. It was the sound of an orchestra that knows exactly who it is collaborating with and a conductor who respects that identity, and in some respects had made it his own. The audience, which had been generous all evening, went wild.
There is talk of the orchestras of Paris and Los Angeles exchanging extended residencies in each other’s halls, and the impact could be huge. For while the LA Phil with Dudamel are a well-known and much-admired quantity in Paris, the Orchestre de Paris is not in LA. And if they came with Mäkelä to Disney Hall, it could be like the time in 1982 when Herbert von Karajan brought the Berlin Philharmonic to Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena for one of the great Mahler Ninths of all time.
