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Così fan tutte reveals how Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart revised an apparently light-hearted theme to turn it into an incisive drama that lifts the veil on human nature with great finesse and irony. Following on from Pelléas et Mélisande in April, this Mozart masterpiece is the second opera Ludovic Morlot will be directing this spring. As the resident conductor of La Monnaie’s Symphonic Orchestra, he evokes the subtlety, profundity, and complexity of this extraordinary score.
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Interview

by Greg Flanders at Blog Down to Washington

Feb. 21 2013

Ludovic Morlot has made a big splash in his first few years as music director of the Seattle Symphony, drawing praise for triumphantly leading his ensembles through notoriously difficult works. Later this month, Morlot will lead another orchestra in a challenging piece when he guest-conducts the University Symphony through Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. Blog Down to Washington caught up with Morlot after rehearsal, and he agreed to answer a few questions about the concert, his thoughts on conducting a student orchestra, and the importance of music in our lives.

Blog Down to Washington: Some of the audience members will be Arts Dawgs pass holders. As part of this series, they’ll be seeing a dance recital, live theater, a museum exhibition—that is, these are people who are interested in the arts, but not necessarily coming from an orchestral music background. Do you have any advice for people who are maybe not as experienced with classical music when they come to this concert?

Ludovic Morlot: I think that if this is the first time they experience live symphony music, they should feel very lucky. One of the things I’m trying to do with the Seattle Symphony is to really create that first opportunity to experience live sound as early as possible in our lives. Once we’ve created that memory, it doesn’t really matter if you like Ravel or Mozart or Pink Floyd, or whatever.

Beyond that, there is the element of experiencing a live performance. Music is a performing art—Classical music is not something you hang on a wall. Each time you start a concert you have to start from scratch. You don’t know if the oboe reed is going to be splitting well that night or if something’s going to go wrong—it has that element of adrenaline that one would identify with any other performing art: dance, theater, even sports, to some extent. So this is what I think would be easy for people coming from different backgrounds to identify with: that experience of live performance. The excitement and the energy that we can create on stage is what I hope people can get out of it. And the sheer beauty of the music, of course.

I know that this concert also features many different soloists from the University, so it’s an exciting night just for that, and there will be great variety, with [a concerto by] Prokofiev and Ravel’s Left Hand Concerto, so my collaboration with the orchestra is only a small part of this big deal.

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Interview

Michael Upchurch for Seattle Times
Jan 31 2013

Whole sumptuous realms of melody will be on offer next week when the Seattle Symphony performs Brahms’ Symphony No. 4, Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Rossini’s “William Tell” Overture.

But there’s one item on the program that’s both a special occasion for music director Ludovic Morlot and a possible worry to less adventurous music lovers.

It’s the world premiere of Elliott Carter’s “Instances,” the last orchestral piece the experimental composer wrote before his death at 103 last November.

The Carter premiere is, in its way, a surprise to Morlot.

“It’s a commission,” he said in an interview earlier this month, “that happened without me really commissioning it.”

A little background: As assistant conductor at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which premiered a number of Carter pieces, Morlot was familiar with the composer’s work. But his Carter connection took a dramatic turn in 2006 when, with only 24 hours’ notice, he was tapped to lead the New York Philharmonic through Carter’s “Allegro scorrevole.” The performance won both men great acclaim.

They subsequently grew close, and when Morlot learned he’d be taking the helm at the Seattle Symphony, he told the composer, “I’d love you to write a little something for me.”

He didn’t hear anything from Carter for a while. Then, last spring, the score of “Instances” turned up in the mail, with an inscription on its first page: “This score is dedicated to Ludovic Morlot who has performed many of my works so beautifully.”

“Just to know that for two minutes he’d been thinking of me while composing — it’s very moving,” Morlot says.

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Interview

Michael Upchurch in Seattle Times
Jan 28 2013

It’s a piano concerto. No, it’s a percussion concerto. No, it’s the mother of all symphonies! — longer, at close to 80 minutes, than Beethoven’s Ninth, and with 10 movements to boot, instead of a measly four.

Or maybe it’s an ondes Martenot concerto…?

“Turangalîla-Symphonie” by French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) isn’t like anything else in the 20th-century symphonic repertoire. Huge, ecstatic, complex, beautiful, it is, in the composer’s words, both a “love song” and a “hymn to joy.”

It was composed in 1946-1948 and premiered by Leonard Bernstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1949. The Seattle Symphony brings it to Benaroya Hall this week, with Ludovic Morlot conducting, Jean-Yves Thibaudet on piano and Cynthia Millar on ondes Martenot (more on that later).

The title, as Messiaen explained, is a Sanskrit word.

“As with all words from ancient oriental languages,” he wrote, “its meaning is very rich. ‘Lila’ literally means play — but play in the sense of the divine action upon the cosmos, the play of creation, of destruction, of reconstruction, the play of life and death. ‘Lila’ is also Love. ‘Turanga’: this is time that runs, like a galloping horse; this is time that flows, like sand in an hourglass.”

If that sounds a little out there, it’s perfectly apt for the often otherworldly sound of the music.

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Interview

Michael Upchurch for Seattle Times
Jan 18 2013

Something old, something new, something collaborative — and some things only world-class soloists can do.

The Seattle Symphony’s 2013-2014 season has a sweeping variety that promises to be, well … symphonic.

This is the orchestra’s second year with Ludovic Morlot as music director, and it continues in the same eclectic vein that marked his first season.

The next Masterworks series opens with an all-Ravel concert, featuring keyboard star Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and closes with an all-Stravinsky program (his three great ballets: “The Firebird,” “Petrushka” and “Rite of Spring”).

In between, Morlot will delve into what he calls the “war horses” of the classical repertoire: Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”), Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Brahms’ Symphony No. 2, to name just a few.

He won’t neglect new music either, as he conducts U.S. premieres of works by French composer Pascal Dusapin, Scotland’s James MacMillan and Russia’s Alexander Raskatov.

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Profile

by David Mermelstein
Oct 17 2012

Ludovic Morlot is that rarest of musicians, a conductor at once humble and self-confident. Among a crop of rising music directors, he stands out for the breadth of his intelligence, his innate musicality, the diversity of his repertory, his commitment to audience expansion and – perhaps most important of all – his common touch as signaled by his unusual approachability.

At 38 (still young in the world of conducting, where eminences often thrive well into their eighties), Morlot has secured two plum positions notable for their differentiation. Last season, he succeeded Gerard Schwarz as music director of the Seattle Symphony. And this season, he assumes the position of chief conductor at La Monnaie/De Munt in Brussels. That symphonic-operatic divide is no coincidence, for Morlot has strong feelings about how the two forms diverge as well as complement each other. “The fact that today I can have that diet between the two almost equally is exactly what I’ve been dreaming of,” he said over a hearty lunch of heirloom tomatoes followed by steak in Chicago in early June. He was in this capital of the American Midwest to conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with whom he has enjoyed a warm relationship since his debut there in 2006, when he replaced an ailing Riccardo Muti. “It’s also nice to have two completely different rhythms,” he added. “With opera, you can be for six weeks in one place,” as opposed to just a week, or less, for most symphonic programs.

Morlot cites “growth” as the “driving force” of his career. “I’m not 40 years old yet,” he said. “But even though I’m super-busy, I must keep in mind where I want to be 20 years from now. Conducting opera gives me time to think. I can be more reflective. Time isn’t so much your enemy in that configuration. All that time you spend with the singers – people who challenge you with different issues – helps force you to think. It’s not only the score that you’re dealing with. When you prepare a symphony program, you know you have only that limited time to make it what it is. That is it. You cannot really change you mind halfway through rehearsals of a Brahms symphony. You can only do that when you come back to it the next time. But opera is totally different. It’s silly if you don’t take the opportunity to learn from this singer or that director or that lighting designer. In the opera, you have time to try out an idea, leave it or take it, argue about it. And this meets the growth pattern I seek. So this is for me the real attraction of the position in Brussels. It’s selfish I suppose, all this attention on growth.”

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Interview

Benoît Jacquemin for La Monnaie De Munt, MYMM
May 11 2012

As the new resident conductor of the Monnaie Symphony Orchestra, Ludovic Morlot will be entitled to a much longer interview in the next issue of MMM. In this interview he talks about two composers very dear to him, Beethoven and Schumann, who he has decided to include in the programme for his second full concert in charge of his new orchestra.

The Pastoral Symphony occupies a special place in Beethoven’s symphonies. What do you think of this work? How will you tackle it in order to avoid the clichés?

Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is, without doubt, along with the Ninth, the most difficult work in the composer’s symphonic repertoire. It is conceived with a romantic form but requires the discipline of a classical interpretation. It has to be, I think, approached like a piece of chamber music with special attention paid to the smallest details of phrasing, articulation, nuance. Nothing can be left to chance in order to be able to add that final touch of magic which makes it so special. As for the clichés maybe we can avoid them by exaggerating them! We know that each of the movements is intended to awaken our feelings and moods by evoking rather than describing the countryside scenes. The storm in the fourth movement makes us feel the emotions only if each of the gestures is exaggerated and, therefore, it inevitably belongs in the world of cliché. It is the same thing with the bird song at the end of Scene at the brook and the Country dancing in the scherzo.

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