Conductor Raphaël Pichon makes delayed New York debut at age 40

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NEW YORK (AP) — Raphaël Pichon was at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport with his Ensemble Pygmalion orchestra and chorus on March 12, 2020, catching a plane to New York for his U.S. debut nine days later at the Park Avenue Armory in Monteverdi’s “Marian Vespers.”

First the flight was delayed. Then it was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“In the middle of the night they closed the skies,” the conductor said.

His American debut was delayed until December 2021 with Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society. He makes first New York appearance at age 40 on Thursday night, leading the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in a program with baritone Christian Gerhaher and soprano Ying Fang titled “Mein Traum (My Dream)” featuring works by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Carl Maria von Weber.

“I think he’s really the future of classical music,” said James Roe, the St. Luke’s orchestra president. “He sees the potential of the concert experience in a way that’s both expansive and welcoming and of the next generation. And he wants the concerts to propose a story, a narrative, an odyssey, a way of moving an audience member from their everyday life to something extraordinarily pleasurable.”

Roe first met Pichon at the 2023 Salzburg Festival in Austria, where Pichon led a new production of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro ” by director Martin Kušej that included cocaine-fueled fights and a predator priest. Pichon’s wife, soprano Sabine Devieilhe, sang Susanna.

“I think, sadly, the stage director was in a very, very bad mood and a very difficult moment of his life, and, sadly, the consequences were big,” Pichon said.

The Vienna Philharmonic in the pit produced a different sound than the leaner approach Pichon is used to from Pygmalion’s period instruments. As the Salzburg Festival’s resident orchestra since 1922, the Vienna Philharmonic performs in numerous operas and concerts.

“Sometimes 100% of the orchestra is changing from one night to the next night, so it could create some fantastic nights and some really banal moments, so it’s really strange,” Pichon said. “I’m not sure it’s really music, but an amazing experience. Learned a lot. Never again. You understand many things about Salzburg, about Austrian culture, about Viennese culture, their role in this classical music world. It’s really something, but it’s a really strange philosophy. Vienna Philharmoniker — it’s a society inside a society. It’s a really strange world.”

Alex Fortes, a St. Luke’s violin player, said Pichon made an immediate positive impression this week.

“He has both an incredible clarity and a physical movement in terms of communicating what he wants,” Fortes said, “as well as incredibly eloquent and precise language to describe those things quite figuratively and beautifully that inspire the orchestra.”

Born in Brittany, Pichon played violin when he was young, started singing in a choir when he was 10 and gave that up for piano and harpsichord. He met Devieilhe while singing in a youth choir. They live together with their two young children in Paris’ 13th arrondissement, a unit combined from several apartments that is soundproofed, allowing each a piano to practice with.

Gerhaher first encountered Devieilhe when they sang together at Munich’s Bavarian State Opera last summer.

“She was just absolutely outstanding and amazing and I thought, well, her husband must be equally brilliant. Otherwise they can’t stay together,” Gerhaher said with a laugh.

Pichon founded Pygmalion in 2006. It performs 60-70 concerts per year, including at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, the Dutch National Opera and Paris’ Opéra-Comique, where Pichon conducted an opera with his wife for the first time, Léo Delibes’ “Lakmé,” in 2022. Pichon has commissioned a comic opera from French-Argentine composer Oscar Strasnoy to premiere there in 2027.

“I’m just a bit tired with all these operas telling us (about) the end of the world and I wanted something really different and more corrosive and more comic and more sarcastic,” Pichon said.

While he is a Baroque specialist, he has listened to the British rock band Radiohead for two decades.

“There are a lot of parallels with classical music, because I’m really so amazed by their ability to erase what they’ve just done and try to explore each time a new world,” Pichon said.

He led the St. Luke’s orchestra on Monday for a rehearsal at The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, in a windswept area of Manhattan near the Hudson River. The harshest cold snap of the winter had set in.

“The music we are making is the biggest contrast from the weather we experienced outside,” Fortes recalled Pichon saying. “It’s full of warmth and fire and beauty.”