Orchestre National de France © Radio France / Christophe Abramowitz
Orchestre National de France
Music direction: Cristian Măcelaru
The Orchestre National de France, by virtue of its heritage and the dynamism of its project, is the guarantor of the interpretation of French music. Through its international tours, the Orchestre National de France promotes the French cultural exception throughout the world. Committed to being close to its audiences, it is the driving force behind a Grand Tour that covers the whole of France, and also carries out a particularly active educational program.
The Orchestre National de France is Radio France’s first permanent symphony orchestra. Founded in 1934, it was born of a desire to forge a tool at the service of the symphonic repertoire. This ambition, combined with the broadcasting of concerts on the radio, has made the Orchestre National a prestigious formation.
Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht, the orchestra’s first principal conductor, established the orchestra’s musical tradition, with a strong emphasis on French music, which remains one of the pillars of its repertoire. After the war, Manuel Rosenthal, André Cluytens, Roger Désormière, Charles Munch, Maurice Le Roux and Jean Martinon continued this tradition. Sergiu Celibidache, first guest conductor from 1973 to 1975, was succeeded by Lorin Maazel, who became Music Director in 1977. From 1989 to 1998, Jeffrey Tate held the position of Principal Guest Conductor; Charles Dutoit from 1991 to 2001, then Kurt Masur from 2002 to 2008, Daniele Gatti from 2008 to 2016 and Emmanuel Krivine from 2017 to 2020, took over as Music Director. On September 1, 2020, Cristian Măcelaru takes over as Music Director of the Orchestre National de France.
Throughout its history, the orchestra has multiplied encounters with conductors – let’s mention Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Sir Colin Davis, Bernard Haitink, Antal Doráti, Eugen Jochum, Igor Markevitch, Lovro von Matačić, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa, Georges Prêtre, Wolfgang Sawallisch, Sir Georg Solti or Evgueni Svetlanov, and soloists such as Martha Argerich, Claudio Arrau, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Nelson Freire, Yo Yo Ma, Yehudi Menuhin, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Vlado Perlemuter, Sviatoslav Richter, Mstislav Rostropovitch, Arthur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern.
It has premiered many twentieth-century masterpieces, including Boulez’s Le Soleil des eaux, Varèse’s Déserts, Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie (French premiere), Xenakis’s Jonchaies and most of Dutilleux’s major works.
The Orchestre National gives an average of 70 concerts a year in Paris, at the Auditorium de Radio France, its principal residence since November 2014, and on tours in France and abroad. In November and December 2022, for example, he toured the major German and Austrian concert halls. He maintains an affinity with the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where he performs every year, as well as with the Philharmonie de Paris. For the past fifteen years, it has also been running an educational project aimed at amateur musicians, families and schoolchildren, visiting schools from kindergarten to university.
All its concerts are broadcast on France Musique, and frequently on international radio stations. The orchestra also records fiction concerts with France Culture. These are just some of the original projects that mark the synergy between the orchestra and the world of radio.
Numerous concerts are available online and on video on the France Musique concert site, and television broadcasts are on the increase (the Concert de Paris, broadcast live from the Champ-de-Mars on the evening of July 14th, is watched by several million viewers).
Numerous recordings are available to music lovers, including a boxed set of 8 CDs featuring previously unreleased radio recordings and retracing the orchestra’s history. More recently, the Orchestre National, under the baton of Louis Langrée, recorded Ravel’s two piano concertos with pianist Alexandre Tharaud, and to mark the centenary of the death of Camille Saint-Saëns, a complete set of symphonies conducted by Cristian Măcelaru on Warner Classics. Finally, a boxed set of George Enescu’s symphonies conducted by Cristian Măcelaru has just been released by Deutsche Grammophon.