Cristian Măcelaru renews his contract as Music Director with the Orchestre National de France

Cristian Macelaru announces a contract renewal as Music Director of the Orchestre National De France

For Immediate Release

PARIS (September 15, 2022) — Conductor Cristian Măcelaru has renewed his contract as Music Director of the Orchestre National de France. This was announced today by Sibyle Veil, Chief Executive Officer of Radio France, and Michel Orier, Director of Music and Cultural Creation, at Radio France have signed a contract to extend Măcelaru’s tenure as Music Director of the ONF into 2027.

Cristian Măcelaru has been Music Director of the Orchestre National de France since September 2020. Through his tenure the orchestra has reaffirmed its defining role in French music, further enhanced its reputation, and developed its relationship with new audiences.

French repertoire to the fore

In September 2020, when Cristian Măcelaru conducted his first concert as Music Director of the Orchestre National de France, he chose music by Saint-Saëns. Throughout his initial period of tenure he gave pride of place to the great French composer, who died in 1921; Saint-Saëns’ Requiem was the work chosen to bring the centenary programming to an end. 2021 also brought the release, on Warner Classics, of a complete cycle of Saint-Saëns’ symphonies, recorded in la Maison de la radio et de la musique in Paris. This was Cristian Măcelaru’s first contribution to the ONF’s discography. Under Măcelaru’s baton the orchestra has also played the music of such French composers as Debussy, Ravel, Fauré, Chabrier, Schmitt, Lalo, Varèse, Messiaen, Dutilleux, Mantovani and Manoury. In the 2022-23 season Cristian Măcelaru and the Orchestre National de France will celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of César Franck.

Reputation and outreach

Cristian Măcelaru’s commitment to reaching an ever-wider audience is expressed through the Grand Tour du National, which focuses on France, and the orchestra’s international schedule. The Grand Tour comprises concerts all over France, visiting towns and cities that only rarely host symphony orchestras and giving audiences the opportunity to hear repertoire rarely performed outside Paris. While Covid-19 inevitably created a period of disruption, the 2022-23 season brings high-profile international tours in Europe (Germany & Austria) and Asia (China) with prominent soloists such as pianist Daniil Trifonov and violinist Renaud Capuçon. Young people and education are also of great importance to Cristian Măcelaru. The players of the Orchestre National de France lead many activities in this area and Măcelaru’s participation has embraced the Viva l’orchestra project, which brings together different generations of players, both amateur and professional. All the Orchestre National de France’s concerts are recorded by Radio France and broadcast on France Musique, attracting an average audience of 140,000 listeners for each event. Moreover, the ONF’s concerts are made available online through the websites of Radio France and ARTE Concert, and through ARTE TV and France Télévisions. On 14th July 2022, Cristian Măcelaru conducted the annual Concert de Paris for the first time; it was broadcast on France 2, France Inter and all over the world.

Forthcoming concerts in the 2022-23 season

Opening the 2022-23 season on Thursday 15th September, Cristian Măcelaru conducts the Orchestre National de France in Fauré’s Pavane, Poulenc’s setting of the Gloria, Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto n°2 (soloist: Seong-Jin Cho) and Ravel’s La Valse in a new performing edition.

In October and November Cristian Măcelaru will conduct the ONF in the following concerts as part of the 2022-23 Radio France season:

Wednesday 12th October / Thursday 13th October
Ravel, Shéhérazade, with soprano Fatma Saïd

Thursday 17th November
Bartók / Mozart, with violinist Maxim Vengerov (Philharmonie de Paris)

Thursday 24th November
Franck / Scriabin, with pianist Daniil Trifonov, preceding the orchestra’s tour of Germany and Austria

About Cristian Măcelaru

Cristian Măcelaru became Music Director of the Orchestre National de France on 1st September 2020. He was born in the Romanian city of Timișoara in 1980. After violin studies in Romania he went to the USA, training at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and at the universities of Miami and Houston, where he studied conducting with Larry Rachleff before attending masterclasses given by David Zinman, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Oliver Knussen and Stefan Asbury at the Tanglewood Music Center and Aspen Music Festival. Aged just 19, at New York’s Carnegie Hall, he made his first appearance as concertmaster of the Miami Symphony Orchestra, becoming the youngest concertmaster in the history of the orchestra. Currently he is Music Director of the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne and, since 2017, of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California. Cristian Măcelaru first gained international attention in 2012, when he stood in for Pierre Boulez as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. That same year he received the Solti Emerging Conductor Award, which was followed in 2014 by the Solti Conducting Award. Since then he has conducted the leading American orchestras – the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Cleveland, and enjoys an especially close relationship with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which he has conducted more than 150 times. In Europe, Cristian Măcelaru appears regularly as a guest conductor with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw, Dresden Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and BBC Symphony Orchestra. In October 2021, Cristian Măcelaru accepted the invitation of Romania’s Minister of Culture to become Artistic Director of the George Enescu Festival in Bucharest.

About Orchestre National de France

The Orchestre National de France is both an established authority and a dynamic force in the interpretation of French music. Its international tours have made it a flagship for French culture across the world, while its presence throughout France, reinforced by vibrant educational programmes, has cemented its relationship with a diversity of national audiences.

A Radio France ensemble, the Orchestre National de France was founded in 1934 as the country’s first full-time symphony orchestra. Its mission to serve the symphonic repertoire was furthered by radio broadcasts of its concerts, and it soon achieved an enviable reputation.

Désiré Émile Inghelbrecht was the first conductor to take charge of the ensemble. The musical tradition he established, characterised by a significant commitment to French repertoire, continues today. He was followed after World War II by Manuel Rosenthal, André Cluytens, Roger Désormière, Charles Munch, Maurice Le Roux and Jean Martinon. Sergiu Celibidache, the orchestra’s principal guest conductor from 1973 to 1975, was succeeded by Lorin Maazel, who in 1977 became its music director. Jeffrey Tate held the post of principal guest conductor from 1989 to 1998, while subsequent music directors have been Charles Dutoit (1991 to 2001), Kurt Masur (2002 to 2008), Daniele Gatti (2008 to 2016) and Emmanuel Krivine (2017 to 2020). The current music director is Cristian Măcelaru, who assumed his responsibilities on 1st September 2020.

Conductors associated with the orchestra over its history include 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 and Yevgeny Svetlanov, while it has welcomed such soloists 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 and Isaac Stern.

In the course of the 20th century the Orchestre National de France gave the premieres of a number of major works, including Le Soleil des eaux by Boulez, Déserts by Varèse, Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony (French premiere), Xenakis’s Jonchaies and the majority of Dutilleux’s large-scale compositions.

Each year the Orchestre National de France gives a total of some 70 concerts in Paris, basing itself since November 2014 at the Auditorium de Radio France, and on tour in France and abroad. In January 2020 it made a notable tour of major venues in Germany and Austria. The orchestra preserves its long-standing links with the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where it appears each year, and also makes regular visits to the Philharmonie de Paris. For the last 15 years its education programme has reached out to amateur musicians, families, schoolchildren and students, developing relationships with institutions from nursery schools through to universities.

Radio plays an important role in the orchestra’s activities. All its concerts are broadcast on France Musique, and frequently also by international radio stations, and its innovative approach is exemplified by its collaboration with France Culture on its storytelling concerts.

Many of the orchestra’s concerts are also available to watch online on francemusique.fr, and an ever-growing number of them are televised. The Concert de Paris, broadcast live from the Champ-de-Mars on Bastille Day, 14th July, regularly attracts millions of viewers.

Numerous recordings by the orchestra are commercially available, including an eight-disc box of previously unreleased radio recordings which traces the orchestra’s history. More recently, under its previous music director Emmanuel Krivine, the orchestra recorded Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concertos Nos 2 and 5 with Bertrand Chamayou and Debussy’s La Mer and Images. 2020 brought the release of Airlines, an album of music by film composer Alexandre Desplat featuring flautist Emmanuel Pahud, while a box of the complete Saint-Saëns symphonies, conducted by Cristian Măcelaru, was released in November 2021 by Warner Classics.