As both a lauded composer and a world renowned conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen has a restless innovation that marks him as one of the most important artists in classical music. The Boston Globe has said that he displays “a kind of complete musicianship rarely encountered today.” Salonen is currently the Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor for London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and the Conductor Laureate for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was Music Director from 1992 until 2009. His pieces Floof and LA Variations have become established modern classics, and new compositions continue to be performed around the globe.

Trained in the austere world of European modernism and enjoying a close relationship with the sunny city of Los Angeles, Salonen composes works that move freely between contemporary idioms, combining intricacy and technical virtuosity with playful rhythmic and melodic innovations. Three major retrospectives of Salonen’s original work have been heard by capacity audiences and received critical acclaim: at Festival Présences Paris in 2011; at the Stockholm International Composer Festival in 2004; and at Musica Nova, Helsinki, in 2003. Salonen has completed several works for symphony orchestra, including Foreign Bodies (2001), commissioned by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Insomnia (2002), co-commissioned by Suntory Hall, Tokyo and Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Hamburg, and Wing on Wing, which received its world premiere at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2004 and was a gift from the composer to the Los Angeles Philharmonic in honor of their new home. In 2007, Salonen conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of his Piano Concerto, dedicated to Yefim Bronfman, who also premiered it. Salonen’s Violin Concerto, which premiered with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Leila Josefowicz in 2009, won the 2012 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and was released on Deutsche Grammophon along with Salonen’s Nyx in 2012.

VIOLIN∣Renaud Capuçon

Renaud Capuçon’s exceptional musicianship and technical command are matched by his generosity of spirit. His artistry is at once sensitive and strong, elegant and poised, yet capable of projecting edgy emotions with spine-tingling intensity. He brings a rare lyricism and true virtuosity to the art of violin playing, unlocking his instrument’s singing qualities to reveal an extraordinary variety of tone colours and timbres. When he was named Artist of the Year at the 2024 International Classical Music Awards, the jury’s citation summed him up as follows: “Violinist and conductor, an artist committed to civil and social causes, Renaud Capuçon is one of the greatest living musicians”.

Deutsche Grammophon announced the launch of an enterprising creative collaboration with Capuçon in September 2022. The ground-breaking initiative is set to deliver a multi-year series of projects, comprising both audio and audio-visual releases. Recordings stemming from his work with young artists and composers will be produced by a special company co-owned by the artist and released by DG.

Capuçon launched his new relationship with the Yellow Label in November 2022, with an album of sonatas by Schumann, Beethoven and Franck made with Martha Argerich in concert at the Aix-en-Provence Easter Festival six months earlier and dedicated to the memory of their friend and pianist colleague Nicholas Angelich. He followed this with a series of three Mozart albums. Capuçon’s recordings of the composer’s 16 mature violin sonatas with pianist Kit Armstrong were released in June 2023; his readings of the complete violin concertos with the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne came out in September 2023; and the new Beau Soir imprint was inaugurated with Mozart’s two piano quartets, recorded by Capuçon and three outstanding young colleagues, and released digitally in November 2023.

ORCHESTRE DE PARIS

The heir to the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire founded in 1828, the Orchestre de Paris gave its inaugural concert on 14 November 1967 under the direction of Charles Munch. Herbert von Karajan, Sir Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim, Semyon Bychkov, Christoph von Dohnányi, Christoph Eschenbach, Paavo Järvi and most recently Daniel Harding have followed Munch as music director. Since January 2021, Klaus Mäkelä is the tenth music director of the Orchestre de Paris for a six-year tenure.

After many migrations in the course of its half-century of history, the Orchestra became Principal Resident of the Philharmonie de Paris when it opened in January 2015. It found this building designed by the architect Jean Nouvel a venue ideally suited to perpetuating its French tradition and tone colour. In January 2019, the Orchestra embarked on a new stage in its rich history by becoming an integral part of this cultural hub unparalleled anywhere in the world, as a specific department situated at the very core of the artistic project of the Philharmonie de Paris.

The Orchestre de Paris, France’s leading symphony orchestra, gives around a hundred concerts with its 119 musicians each season, at the Philharmonie de Paris or on international tours. The Orchestra’s strategy places its activities in the direct line of descent from the French musical tradition, and therefore plays a key role in serving both the repertories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and contemporary creation through the hosting of composers in residence, the premieres of numerous works and the presentation of cycles devoted to the tutelary figures of the twentieth century (Messiaen, Dutilleux, Boulez and others.).

Strengthened by its position at the heart of the artistic and educational facilities of the Philharmonie de Paris, the Orchestra more than ever views its work for young people as a top priority. Whether in the various spaces at the Philharmonie or outside its walls – in Paris or its suburbs – it offers a wide range of activities, open to schoolchildren or families as well as to citizens who are further removed from musical life and in situations of vulnerability.