Matthias Pintscher, conductor

The 2022-23 season is Matthias Pintscher’s final season as Music Director of the Ensemble intercontemporain (EI), the world’s foremost contemporary music ensemble, founded in 1980 by Pierre Boulez and winner of the 2022 Polar Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in music.

In his most successful decade-long artistic leadership of EIC, he continued and expanded the cultivation of new work by emerging composers of the 21st century, alongside performances of iconic works by the pillars of the avant-garde of the 20th Century. In this, his valedictory season, Mr. Pintscher has a robust season of concerts in Paris including collaborations with the Conservatoire de Paris and IRCAM, operas-in-concert and tours throughout Europe and the United States, including performances in Carnegie Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall.

As a conductor, Mr. Pintscher enjoys and maintains relationships with several of the world’s most distinguished orchestras, among them the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and BBC Scottish Symphony. He is also Creative Partner for the Cincinnati Symphony. As guest conductor in Europe, he makes debut appearances this season with the Wiener Symphoniker and Gurzenich Orchester of Cologne, and returns to the Royal Concertgebouw, BRSO, BBC Scottish SO, Barcelona Symphony and Berlin’s Boulez Ensemble. In North America, he will make prominent debuts with The Philadelphia Orchestra and Kansas City Symphony, in addition to regular visits to Cincinnati Symphony, and repeat guest engagements with

the Detroit Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic and New World Symphony. Mr. Pintscher has also conducted several opera productions for the Berliner Staatsoper (Beat Furrer’s Violetter Schnee, Wagner’s Lohengrin), Wiener Staatsoper (Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando) and the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. He returns to the Berliner Staatsoper in 2023 for Der Fliegende Holländer. 

Mr. Pintscher is well known as a composer, and his works appear frequently on the programs of major symphony orchestras throughout the world. In 2021 he was the focus of the Suntory Hall Summer Festival—a weeklong celebration of his works with the Tokyo Symphony, as well as a residency by the EIC with symphonic and chamber music performances. His third violin concerto, Assonanza, written for Leila Josefowicz, was premiered in January 2022 with the Cincinnati Symphony. Another 2021-22 world premiere was neharot, a co-commission of Suntory Hall, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Staatskapelle Dresden, where he was named Capell-Compositeur. In the 2016-17 season, he was the inaugural composer-in-residence of the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and from 2014 to 2017, he was artist-in-residence at the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.

Mr. Pintscher began his musical training in conducting, studying with Pierre Boulez and Péter Eötvös in his early twenties, when composing soon took a more prominent role in his life. He rapidly gained critical acclaim in both areas of activity and continues to compose in addition to his conducting career. A prolific composer, Mr. Pintscher's music is championed by some of today's finest performing artists, orchestras and conductors. His works have been performed by such orchestras as the Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris, among many others. He is published exclusively by Barenreiter, and recordings of his works can be found on Kairos, EMI, Teldec, Wergo, and Winter & Winter.

Ensemble intercontemporain

In 1976 Pierre Boulez founded the Ensemble intercontemporain with the support of Michel Guy (who was Minister of Culture at the time) and the collaboration and Nicholas Snowman.

The Ensemble’s 31 soloists share a passion for 20th-21st-century music. They are employed on permanent contract, enabling them to fulfill the major aims of the Ensemble: performance, creation and education for young musicians and the general public. Under the artistic direction of Matthias Pintscher, the musicians work in close collaboration with composers, exploring instrumental techniques and developing projects that interweave music, dance, theater, film, video and visual arts.

In collaboration with IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), the Ensemble intercontemporain is also active in the field of synthetic sound generation. New pieces are commissioned and performed on a regular basis.

The Ensemble is renowned for its strong emphasis on music education: concerts for kids, creative workshops for students, training programs for future performers, conductors, composers, etc.

Resident of the Cite de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris, the Ensemble performs and records in France and abroad, taking part in major festivals worldwide.

The Ensemble is financed by the Ministry of Culture and receives additional support from the Paris City Council. In 2022 it was awarded the prestigious Polar Music Prize.

Diego Tosi, violin
John Stulz, viola
Eric-Maria Couturier, cello
Sophie Cherrier, flute
Philippe Grauvogel, oboe
Martin Adamek, clarinet
Jean-Christophe Vervoitte, horn
Samuel Favre, percussion
Dimitri Vassilakis, piano

Jake Arditti, countertenor

Already a professional singer at the age of 11 when he sang Yniold in Pelléas et Mélisande for Glyndebourne Festival Opera and in several productions at English National Opera, Jake Arditti has had a meteoric rise to fame since his prize-winning performance at the 2012 Innsbruck Baroque Singing Competition.

Mr. Arditti’s “… show-stealing riches of vocal colour and stage presence” (Daily Telegraph) have already brought him widespread critical and public acclaim, not only in such baroque virtuoso warhorses as Handel’s Rinaldo (titlerole at Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow), Serse (title-role at Longborough Festival Opera), Riccardo Primo (title-role at the London Handel Festival), Sesto in Giulio Cesare (Teatro Colón and Oper Halle), but also in such rarities as Emone in Traetta’s Antigone (Wiener Kammeroper), Euripilo/La Discordia/Polluce in Cavalli’s Elena (Festival d’Aix en Provence, Lille and Lisbon) and Apollo in Legrenzi’s La Divisione del Mondo with Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques (Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Colmar, Nancy, Versailles and Köln).

Mr. Arditti’s extended vocal range has also seen him encompass such roles as Amore (Theater an der Wien and Zürich Opera) and Nerone in Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (Pinchgut Opera Sydney), as well as Nerone in Agrippina (Theater an der Wien and Göttingen Handel Festival). He sung David in Handel´s Saul (Theater an der Wien, a role debut in a new production directed by Claus Guth and conducted by Laurence Cummings. Mr. Arditti most recently sung the title-role in Robert Carsen’s production of Handel’s Rinaldo for Glyndebourne, as well as the title-role in Corselli’s Achille in Sciro conducted by Ivor Bolton and directed by Mariame Clément at the Teatro Real Madrid.

Mr. Arditti’s Romantic and modern roles include Hänsel in Humperdinck’s Hänsel and Gretel (Wiener Kammeroper), Voice of Apollo in Death in Venice (Stuttgart and Opéra National du Rhin), Prince Gogo in Ligeti’s Le grand macabre (Essen) and SUM by Max Richter and Wayne McGregor, premiered at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre in 2012.

On the concert platform, Mr. Arditti has displayed a similarly remarkable versatility, from Ernesto in Vinci’s Gismondo, re di Polonia (Vienna, Moscow, Dortmund and Bayreuth), Contre-ténors with Il Pomo d’Oro (Sablé and Nice) and From Soul to Soul with the Pera Ensemble (Heidelberg and Cologne), to Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater under Ivor Bolton, or the premieres of Hilda Paredes’ Canciones Lunáticas and Sciarrino’s Cosa Resta with the Arditti Quartet in numerous other venues on both sides of the Atlantic. Most recently he performed Olga Neuwirth’s Hommage à Klaus Nomi along with the Ensemble intercontemporain (Philharmonie in Paris and Cité de la Musique in Strasbourg).

During the 2021-22 season, Mr. Arditti sang the role of Sesto in a new production of Giulio Cesare under the direction of Ivor Bolton (Theater an der Wien). He will returned to Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea singing the role Amore under the direction of Ottavio Dantone (Oper Zürich), and Nerone under the direction of Leonardo Garcia Alarcon (Festival d’Aix-en-Provence). In spring, the countertenor sang Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Los Angeles with Musica Angelica conducted by Martin Haselbock.

Nick León, DJ