Marc Minkowski


Conductor

Initially a bassoonist, Marc Minkowski began conducting at an early age, notably under the guidance of Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux Memorial School in the USA. At the age of nineteen he founded Les Musiciens du Louvre, an ensemble that was to play an active role in the Baroque revival. Together they explored both the French repertoire (Lully, Rameau and Mondonville among others) and Handel (Il trionfo del tempo, Ariodante, Giulio Cesare, Hercules, Semele, the Roman motets and orchestral music), before going on to tackle Mozart, Rossini, Offenbach, Bizet and Wagner.

He has travelled throughout Europe, with and without his orchestra, from Salzburg (Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Die Fledermaus, Mitridate and Così fan tutte) to Brussels (La Cenerentola, Massenet’s Don Quichotte, Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and Il trovatore in 2012) and from Aix-en-Provence (Le nozze di Figaro, Idomeneo and a new production of Die Entführung) to Zurich (Il trionfo del tempo, Giulio Cesare, Agrippina, Les Boréades, Fidelio and La favourite) passing through the Musikfest Bremen, with which a regular partnership was established in 1995 for productions by Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble.

A regular visitor to the Opéra de Paris (Platée, Idomeneo, Die Zauberflöte, Ariodante, Giulio Cesare, Iphigénie en Tauride and Mireille) and the Théâtre du Châtelet (La Belle Hélène, La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, Carmen and the French premiere of Wagner’s Die Feen), he has also been seen at other Parisian theatres, particularly the Opéra Comique where he revived Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche and conducted Pelléas et Mélisande for the work’s centenary in 2002 as well as Massenet’s Cendrillon and in Venice (Auber’s Le Domino noir), Moscow (Pelléas, production by Olivier Py), Berlin (Robert le Diable, Il trionfo del tempo, 2012), Amsterdam (Roméo et Juliette, Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride) and Vienna at the Theater an der Wien (Hamlet, 2012) and the Staatsoper, where in 2010 Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble became the first foreign orchestra to play there (Handel’s Alcina).

Marc Minkowski has been Music Director of the Sinfonia Varsovia since 2008, and is also a regular guest of symphony orchestras with a repertoire increasingly focusing on the 20th century composers Ravel, Stravinsky, Lili Boulanger, Roussel, Adams, Gorecki and Olivier Greif. He is often invited to Germany – by the Dresden Staatskapelle, the Berliner Philharmoniker, the DSO Berlin and the principal Munich orchestras – in addition to conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Wiener Symphoniker, the Mozarteum Orchester, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Orchestra, the Orchestra National du Capitole de Toulouse, the Mariinsky Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the recently formed Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra.

Following their success at the Wiener Konzerthaus in 2009 with a complete cycle of Haydn’s London Symphonies recorded live by Naïve (their exclusive record label since 2007), Les Musiciens du Louvre Grenoble recorded the complete Schubert symphonies there in 2012. May 2012 saw the second edition of Ré Majeure, the festival founded by Marc Minkowski on the Île de Ré off the French Atlantic coast. During the 2012-13 season he will conduct Mozart’s Lucio Silla at the Salzburg Mozartwoche, of which he has been appointed Artistic Director. He will make his debut with the Wiener Philharmoniker in May 2013 and will conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in Don Giovanni at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in July 2013. In the autumn of 2012 he celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of his orchestra’s foundation in a series of Domaine privé concerts at the Cité de la Musique and the Salle Pleyel.

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