Orchestre de Paris
” … Klaus Mäkelä conducts a concert that is more a musical exploration than a complete programme, moving from Pierre Boulez’s Initiale (in the year of his centenary) to Debussy, a religious work by Poulenc, and even Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition orchestrated by Ravel. The sheer diversity of these works invites us to examine their connections, in a spirit of witty musical exploration and talented orchestration.”
“It was the ever-inventive young conductor who brought this short work (Boulez’s Initiale) into the Orchestre de Paris repertoire. The spatialisation he chose preserves the ensemble’s unity of place, whereas other performances separated the duets to accentuate the score’s spiral effect. But his expressive performance, making the most of the exceptional acoustics of the hall, conveys Boulez’s intentions very well. The motifs, which are differentiated by contrasting tempi and styles, alternate between the two groups, giving breath and dynamism to a fine opening in which the brass show off their immense talent.
Olyrix.com, Claire Massy-Paoli, 11 January 2025
“(Pictures at an Exhibition) is often an opportunity for conductors short of inspiration to dazzle the eyes and ears. Fortunately, this evening we have quite the opposite, firstly because Mäkelä has chosen to honour Ravel above all and the extraordinary colourist and orchestrator that he is. Then because the subtlety, the work on sound alloys – so important in Ravel –, the art of narration is admirable … In the final portico (“The Great Gate of kyiv”), the conductor brings out the thousand treasures of Ravel’s orchestration, building a crescendo that relies on the addition and blending of sonorities rather than on power alone.”
* * * * * Bachtrack.com, Jean-Pierre Rousseau, 10 January 2025
“Mäkelä’s broad and sumptuously colored vision relies with delight on the vast palette of timbres and nuances of his Orchestre de Paris, capable of producing real pyrotechnics, whatever the music stand, from velvet ppp to bronze fff, without the slightest failure. This ample thirty-five-minute score presents itself like a great poem in ten sketches welded together by the superb, richly harmonized Russian theme of the Promenade.”
Classique d’aujourd’hui, Bruno Serrou, 13 January 2025
PROGRAMME:
Pierre Boulez: Initiale
Claude Debussy: Nocturnes
Francis Poulenc: Gloria
Modeste Mussorgsky (arr. Maurice Ravel): Pictures at an Exhibition
