All posts in News

Preview

Stella Tsolakidou for Greek USA Reporter, Chicago Events
May 14, 2012

The MCA Stage presents a concert of new works by composers Georges Aperghis, Juan Pablo Carreño, and Patricia Alessandrini, along with an important early work by Aperghis, performed by ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble). Aperghis has been a central figure in the music theater movement that breaks genres and features playful, humorous, or aggressive performance techniques in which musicians act and react to their playing. The concert is guest conducted by renowned Ludovic Morlot and is the final ICE concert of the MCA Stage season, and takes place Saturday, May 26, 2012, at 7:30 pm.

Georges Aperghis is one of Europe’s most influential experimental composers. His compositions are theatrical and provocative, ignoring boundaries and expectations, much like his mentor and fellow Greek Iannis Xenakis. Both Carreño and Alessandrini have been inspired and influenced by Aperghis to explore new directions and expressions in their work. All three currently live in Paris, but were born in other countries: Aperghis in Greece, Carreño in Columbia, and Alessandrini in Italy.

Continue Reading →

Journal

See the first post in our Journal section for a discussion of the program for
the May 12 performance at La Monnaie de Munt.

Critica

Rosa Sanz en ABC.es
Día 07/05/2012 – 12.23h

OSCyL Ludovic Morlot, dtor invitado; S. Osborne, piano; Cynthia Millar, ondas Martenot; Programa: «Turangalila» (O. Messiaen); Valladolid, Auditorio;3-05-2012

Messiaen estrenó «Turangalila» («Sinfonía para piano solo, ondas Martenot y gran orquesta») en 1949. No era la primera vez que el compositor francés recurría a un instrumento novedoso como las ondas Martenot; ya lo había hecho en obras como «Trois petites liturgies de la Présence Divine» (1944), «Deux monodies en quarts de ton» (1938) o la «Fête des belles eaux». Esta última pieza, que incluía un conjunto de seis ejemplares del instrumento electrónico, se interpretó en la Exposición Internacional de París de 1937, en la que curiosamente también se presentó la primera orquesta de ondas musicales Martenot. Evidentemente para un músico como Messiaen, profesor de armonía y composición en el Conservatorio de París, esta especie de primer sintetizador encerraba extraordinarias posibilidades que ilustraban bien algunas de sus novedosas teorías expuestas en su tratado «Técnica de mi lenguaje musical». Su peculiar espectro sonoro remite tanto a arcanos remotos como a espacios utópicos.

Continue Reading →

Entretiens

ResMusica par Jean-Christophe Le Toquin
Le 2 mai 2012

L’année 2012 voit Ludovic Morlot accéder à ses deux premiers postes de Directeur Musical, l’un à la tête d’un orchestre avec le Seattle Symphony pour la saison 2011-2012 et l’autre à la tête d’une maison d’opéra avec la Monnaie de Bruxelles pour la saison 2012-2013. « Ludovic Morlot, a new era » clament des bannières dans les rues encerclant le bâtiment, allusion non voilée à la fin du très long mandat de son prédécesseur Gerard Schwarz, entamé en 1983. ResMusica a rencontré le jeune chef dans son bureau du Benaroya Hall, belle salle de 2500 places qui abrite le Seattle Symphony depuis 1998, pour découvrir comment se vit la musique classique au nord de la côte Pacifique.

ResMusica : Vous êtes désormais le double Directeur musical à Seattle et à Bruxelles, 2012 est l’année de la consécration ?
Ludovic Morlot : Après Boston où j’étais assistant de Seiji Ozawa et James Levine, j’ai passé beaucoup de temps sur la route, pendant trois ans ; ces nominations se sont construites sur l’énergie.

Continue Reading →

Review

Bernard Jacobson for Seen and Heard International
United States Schubert, Janáček, and Brahms Jennifer Koh, (violin), Seattle Symphony, Ludovic Morlot (conductor), Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 24.3.2012 (BJ)

It was just the other day, reviewing Ludovic Morlot’s recent French program with the Seattle Symphony, that I was expressing the view that “a little more of the flexible pulse exhibited throughout this concert would be beneficial to Morlot’s performances of the Viennese classics, where, for all their concentration of form, flexibility is no less appropriate.” Well, the performances that began and ended his concert on 24 March delivered amply in that regard.

It might, indeed, have been possible to feel that in three orchestral numbers and three rarely heard choruses from Schubert’s incidental music to Rosamunde flexibility was carried to a degree of excess–but I most emphatically didn’t feel that way. It all sounded quite fine, especially the sensitively tuneful Entr’acte–the one with the tune Schubert soon recycled for the slow movement of his A-minor String Quartet–in which the orchestra produced some caressing sonorities and some telling rhythmic punctuation under the conductor’s increasingly assured and instinctive leadership.

Continue Reading →

Review

Melinda Bargreen, Special to the Seattle Times
March 17, 2012

Over the years, it has been highly enjoyable to watch the evolution of Renée Fleming from ingénue soprano to opera star to iconic diva. While her career has taken a consistently upward trajectory, she has never lost the knack of surprising and delighting her audiences — as she did in Friday night’s recital at Benaroya Hall with the Seattle Symphony and its music director, Ludovic Morlot.

Most opera divas don’t pick up the microphone in mid-concert and sing indie-rock songs from the repertoire of Death Cab for Cutie and Muse. Most divas don’t include new works (like the eloquent “We Hold These Truths,” by Todd Frazier) among the familiar bonbons (“O Mio Babbino Caro”) in the encore lineup. But then Fleming always has been a singer who does it her way: singing the blues as well as art songs, and bypassing a lot of the usual Verdi and Puccini roles in order to star in operas by Tchaikovsky and Carlisle Floyd.

Continue Reading →

Review

Bernard Jacobsen for Seen and Heard International
United States: Debussy, Dutilleux, Martinů, and Ravel: Xavier Phillips (cello), Seattle Symphony, Ludovic Morlot (conductor), Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 15.3.2012 (BJ)March 17, 2012

This well-designed program was devoted exclusively to one side of the two-branched stream that has constituted Western music history through the past century and more. There is the Germanic side, which focuses primarily though not of course exclusively on structure. And Ludovic Morlot on this occasion flew the French flag, under which color trumps form, in offering four works by composers who either are or were French or, in Martinů’s case, chose the French side by virtue of stylistic sympathy and long Parisian domicile.

The program itself amply demonstrated how wide a range of musical manner and content is embraced within the confines of the term “Gallic”: we were treated to sybaritic sensuality in Debussy’s Prélude à L’Après-midi d’un faune, quicksilver delicacy leavened with momentary bolts of lightning in Dutilleux’s Tout un monde lointain, ballroom gaiety shading into the violent disintegration of a world in Ravel’s La Valse, and, in Martinů’s Les Fresques de Piero della Francesca, what might well be called a “teeming canvas” of alternating radiance and dark power, despite the fact that canvas is not what frescoes are painted on.

Continue Reading →

Review

Philippa Kiraly, Special to the Seattle Times
March 16, 2012

Seattle Symphony music director Ludovic Morlot is back for a couple of weeks, and then he’s gone until June. Next year we will have him for more concerts, and, to judge by the pleasure in his presence taken by orchestra and audience Thursday night, that is good news.

Most of Thursday’s Masterworks series concert at Benaroya Hall was French, in keeping with Morlot’s comment at the start of the year that he expected to bring more of his countrymen’s music to audiences.

Two very different works were familiar to many: Debussy’s “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune” (“Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”), which opened the program, and Ravel’s “La Valse,” which ended it. In between came two much less familiar pieces: Bohemian composer Bohuslav Martinu’s “The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca” and Henri Dutilleux’s cello concerto, “Tout un monde lointain” (“A Whole Distant World”).

Continue Reading →

Review

from Music in Cincinnati
February 25, 2012

Friday morning’s Cincinnati Symphony concert at Music Hall was a time to smell the flowers, February or not.

Guest conductor Ludovic Morlot led a program comprising Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony (No. 6), a CSO premiere by Franz Liszt and Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. Making his CSO debut in the Schumann was American pianist Jonathan Biss (a “neighbor,” you might say, having been born in Bloomington, Indiana).

Biss is superbly musical and with technique to match, but for this young man (31), the music is first and foremost. He demonstrated this in the Schumann, which had a warmth and artistic integrity that engaged and touched all within hearing (including a number of young piano students brought to Music Hall to hear him).

Continue Reading →

Review

Rob Hubbard, Special to the Pioneer Presstwincities.com
February 16, 2012

Ah, Paris in February. Granted, spring is the prime season for visiting the city by the Seine, but soprano Dawn Upshaw and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra are offering a musical journey there this weekend. With the help of French conductor Ludovic Morlot, the SPCO is presenting sets of songs by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, bookending them with Ravel’s ballet music for “Mother Goose” and Mozart’s “Paris” Symphony. Clever continuity, n’est-ce pas?

Building programs with visible threads is something at which the orchestra has really improved in recent seasons, and Thursday night’s concert at the Ordway was an excellent example. And a meeting of Upshaw’s expressive and powerful voice with the evocative impressionism of Debussy and Ravel proved something well worth experiencing.

Continue Reading →