On 11 September, the Philharmonie hosted the Orchestre de Paris’s back-to-school concert in front of a packed house. Since his debut in 2021, the Klaus Mäkelä effect, who is entering his fourth season as music director of the Parisian symphony phalanx, has continued to grow and multiply. The public’s favour is all the greater as the maestro’s mandate ends in 2027, the year in which the young man in his thirties, appointed at the same time to lead two of the most prestigious groups in the world, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will take off internationally.
The evening began in a rather unusual way with the Laudate Domain, by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks (born 1946). A concentrated work, imbued with pain and serenity, which particularly highlights the vocal strengths of the Chorus of the Orchestre de Paris now led by the British conductor Richard Wilberforce, in office since 2023. Alternating orchestral parts, expressive and solemn, and long and dangerously extended a cappella: the homogeneity of the timbres and the precision of the intonation flirt with perfection. “alleluia” The conclusion will finally bring together voices and instruments.
Will-o’-the-wisp game
However, all eyes are on Lisa Batiashvili. Especially since the Georgian violinist is playing one of the hits of the repertoire, Violin Concerto, by Tchaikovsky. The Paris Orchestra launched into the introductory bars that offer the musician a preview of the melodious theme of the first movement. The sound is clear and fruity, the technique absolute, whose subtle arcs configure an inventive and constantly renewed musical discourse.
Far from the violinists who load Tchaikovsky’s boat with sticky romanticism, too laden with fat and sugar (Nutri-score G), Batiashvili infuses the music with a singular grace, whose expressive force and infinite delicacy do not impede the body-to-body grabs of the bow or the adrenaline rush in the vertigo of the high notes. Supported by Mäkelä’s flexible but full-bodied direction, she deploys a touch of will-o’-the-wisp that inspires admiration to the point of marvelling at a cadenza (that moment when the orchestra falls silent to make way for the soloist) of breathtaking beauty.
After the elegiac reverie of a magnificent “Canzonetta” played at its limit, where Batiashvili takes risks with some light gypsy-style portamentos, comes the supercharged finale of a rhapsodic “Allegro vivacissimo”. The musician displays a frenetic freedom of tone, the fireworks of a game that is both playful and nervous, wild and luminous, definitively proving wrong the great violinist Leopold Auer (1845-1930), who resigned to dedicate the work (finally created in 1878 by Adolph Brodsky), who declared it unplayable.
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