March 2016
This tour leads the MCO to the Festival de Pâques in Aix-en-Provence and to the city of Dijon. In two concerts, the orchestra’s Artistic Partner Isabelle Faust appears as soloist and leader, and also performs chamber music together with musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
Isabelle Faust and the MCO have been working together since 2008, connected by the sense of chamber music playing they bring to ensembles of any size. For this tour, they have created a programme that combines both orchestral and chamber pieces. Works by the nineteenth-century composers Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Schumann are set among excerpts from Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, arranged for strings and wind instruments.
The Festival de Pâques was founded in 2014 by violinist Renaud Capuçon, a long-time friend of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, on whose invitation the MCO is present in a variety of activities at this year’s festival edition. A special Easter concert with David Fray at the Cathédrale Saint Sauveur starts off the orchestra’s stay in Aix, which culminates in the concert with Isabelle Faust at the Grand Théâtre de Provence. MCO musicians also spread the festival spirit among a broader audience, performing in the streets of Aix-en-Provence as part of an outreach activity.
Aix-en-Provence is a city with a long-standing MCO tradition: Under the direction of Claudio Abbado, the orchestra made its international breakthrough at the opera festival in 1998. The MCO has spent many summers in Aix since then and always felt at home. The last performances of the MCO in Aix were the world premiere production of George Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin in 2012, which was praised as “the best opera written over the last twenty years” by Le Monde. The orchestra is pleased to return to Aix-en-Provence on this tour.
The final concert of the tour, again with Isabelle Faust, takes place at the Auditorium in Dijon, bringing the MCO to this city in the east of France for the very first time.
Further projects with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s Artistic Partner Isabelle Faust include another tour with this special programme to Germany and Belgium this autumn.