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In a 2023 profile, written as Louis Langrée was preparing to step down as music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival, the New York Times characterized his career as “quietly remarkable but undersung.”
It is an apt description. The French conductor, now 64, has never been interested in just adding notches to his career belt with flashy recordings or high-profile appointments. Instead, he has focused more on building profound relationships with the groups he has led and making meaningful music.
That said, Langrée has nonetheless amassed an impressive résumé that includes a 2013–24 stint as music director of the well-respected Cincinnati Symphony and guest conducting dates with many of the world’s most auspicious classical institutions, from Milan’s La Scala and New York’s Metropolitan Opera to the Berlin Philharmonic and London Philharmonic.
“There are different kinds of wines,” he said. “There are different kinds of people. There are some wines, which give their best when they are young, and some need years and years to become more mature and maybe complex. I’m more the second type, I think.”
One orchestra that has long eluded the conductor is the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, but he will make his overdue debut on Aug. 10 during his first-ever appearance at the Ravinia Festival. He had been scheduled to lead a CSO concert at Ravinia in 2020, but it was canceled because of the COVID-19 shutdown.
“I have grown as a musician listening to so many [CSO] recordings with Fritz Reiner, Jean Martinon and Georg Solti,” he said. “What a wonderful orchestra. I’m really eager to meet them and make music together.”
Fittingly for a conductor who served 21 years at the artistic helm of the Mostly Mozart Festival in New York, he will lead an all-Mozart program. “You have everything in his music,” Langrée said. “You have fun, joy, drama, humor and tragedy.”
The Alsatian native began his career in 1983 as a répétiteur at the Opéra National de Lyon, a job as a pianist that called on him to coach and accompany singers. He got his first taste of conducting when the head of the company saw him observing rehearsals and invited him to assist a young, little-known conductor working there at the time — the now-famous Semyon Bychkov.
“I remember Semyon telling me, ‘Be careful, because if you’re a real conductor, you won’t be able to stop, to live without it. It doesn’t mean you will be a good conductor, but you will be a conductor.’ And that’s what happened,” Langrée said.
His other mentor at the Opéra National de Lyon was another now-celebrated maestro, John Eliot Gardiner, the company’s music director for five years. Young conductors sometimes try to emulate their guides, but Bychkov and Gardiner were so different that it was impossible for Langrée to find a mix of the two. “That forces you to find your own style and language and to question the [musical] pieces differently,” he said. “It was just fantastic.”
After serving as an assistant conductor at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France and Bayreuth Festival in Germany, he assumed the same position with the Orchestre de Paris in 1989 at the invitation of Bychkov, who had just become music director. After three years there, Langrée’s career was solidly launched.
In 2002, he was named to the first of the two most important conducting positions of his career, music director of the popular Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, succeeding Gerald Schwartz, who had held the job since 1984. “I stayed for 21 years,” Langrée said, “because I loved it, and when I gave back the keys, I think I left a better orchestra and I left as a better conductor. We learned from each other.”
In 2013, Langrée took over as a music director of the Cincinnati Symphony, giving him a fall-to-spring post to complement his summer Mostly Mozart activities. On the advice of English conductor Simon Rattle, who told him that the only way to really understand the soul of a city was to live there, he moved with his family to Ohio. “For 11 years, I was part of the city,” he said.
He is proud of what he and the orchestra accomplished during his tenure, including tours to Asia and Europe and the commissioning of 60 new works. “As a man, as a leader, and as a musician, it was the happiest tenure of my life,” he said. But when COVID-19 hit in 2020 and brought the orchestra’s live public performances to a halt, he admits to feeling a little lost. He began to think about what he wanted to do next and informed Cincinnati Symphony leaders that he would not renew his contract beyond 2024.
“Of course, you can make more recordings, organize more tours and study more pieces,” he said, “but somehow, I thought for the next chapter of my life that I should do something else than just be a music director.”
That next thing soon knocked on his door. He applied to be not the music director but the director — what in the United States is usually known as the general director — of France’s Théâtre National de l’Opéra-Comique, which has presented the premieres of such notable works as Georges Bizet’s Carmen and Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Although it does stage fully sung operas now, the celebrated French company long presented only works that combined singing and spoken dialogue, what the Germans call ingspiel. “Basically, it’s the ancestor of the Broadway musical, where you sing, you speak, and you dance,” Langrée said.
While it is unusual for a conductor or other musical artist to take on such an administrative role, in any case, he jumped at the chance, drawing on his background as music director of the Opéra National de Lyon in 1998–2000 and England’s Glyndebourne Touring Opera in 1998–2003. French President Emmanuel Macron has extended his contract through 2029.
While he does still conduct one or two of the company’s eight or so annual productions, his focus is much more on the business side of the company’s operations. He joked that he studies the book Inflation for Dummies at night. One task he especially enjoys is fundraising, because of the sense of shared purpose it engenders. The Opéra-Comique does receive substantial funding from the French government, but he is still responsible for supplementing such subsidies with private support, a process he learned about in his American posts.
His commitment to Opéra-Comique has meant that he has very little time left for guest conducting, maybe four or five engagements during the fall-to-spring season, like his concerts in 2024/25 with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in Carnegie Hall and Montréal’s Orchestre Métropolitain, but the summer brings more opportunities.
Ravinia leaders approached him with the idea of an all-Mozart program, and he needed little persuasion. He will be joined by acclaimed pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who chose to perform the Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat Major, K. 482. “It is one of the most sublime piano concertos — one of the greatest pieces by Mozart,” Langrée said.
To open the program, Langrée selected the overture to the opera La clemenza di Tito because it is less often performed than, say, Mozart’s overtures to Don Giovanni or Le Nozze di Figaro, and he admires its “very Mozartean” humanist message. In addition, he liked the “weird, uncommon, and wonderful” connection that the C major key in the overture will have with concerto’s E-flat major key. The program ends with the composer’s famed Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, nicknamed “Jupiter,” which Langrée describes as a combination of sacred, theatrical, chamber and symphonic music. “It’s such an exciting piece to perform, to rehearse, and to share,” he said. “People should feel that there is something bigger than just nice music. It’s an address to the best of humanity.”
In the 2023 New York Times piece, the conductor called his Opéra-Comique job the last major project of his life. But he admits now that those words might have been a bit hasty. He will be just 68 in 2029, a comparatively young age for a conductor.
But Langrée admits he has no idea what kind of post he might want after the Opéra-Comique or if one might even come along. “If the rest of my life after ’29 is to be a guest conductor,” he said, “it would be wonderful. If I’m approached by an institution to start something new or take something over, why not?”
