CINCINNATI, OH.- Rehearsals led by the conductor Louis Langrée tend to follow a trajectory. Early on, he speaks poetically and tells stories; during preparations for a May concert with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, where he is the music director, he explained Saint-Saëns with references to the Kyrie of a Mass and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. But then his language becomes technical and specific; that day, broad explanations of mood gave way to meticulous balance and bowing as the playing took shape like an increasingly detailed, fine sculpture.
Langrée wasn’t afraid, at that point, to repeat a phrase until it was right. Musicians are capable of understanding a direction when it’s given to them, he said in an interview later, “but they need to feel it, physically.”
The result is often an interpretation rich in specificity and color, to a degree that can impress even seasoned musicians. On that program in Cincinnati, Vikingur Olafsson joined the orchestra as the soloist in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, and although he had toured the piece all season, he felt that rehearsing it with Langrée, a Frenchman, was like “talking about Chopin with someone in Warsaw.” And, Olafsson added, “there were things that I hadn’t heard before, and that’s a big compliment.”
And yet, at 62, Langrée has never been one of the world’s most famous or sought-after conductors. His career has been a steady climb of prestige and quality, quietly remarkable but undersung even as he has transformed ensembles: in Cincinnati, where he has been at the podium for a decade, and in New York, where he has been the music director of the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra since 2003.
His time at both posts, though, is coming to an end. Lincoln Center has dropped the Mostly Mozart Festival, keeping its orchestra but changing its music director and name, so Langrée is set to depart this summer at the end of his contract; and his tenure in Cincinnati concludes next season. All this, as he settles into his new job as the leader — not the conductor — of the Opéra Comique in Paris.
Cincinnati, which is still searching for his successor, will have a mourning period, said Jonathan Martin, that orchestra’s chief executive. But Langrée is returning to France on a high note.
“He’d rather leave five years too early,” Martin said, “than stay five minutes too late.”
BORN IN MULHOUSE, France, Langrée is a proud Alsatian, who studied in the region at the Strasbourg Conservatory. From there, his work was primarily as a vocal coach and assistant conductor, at institutions including the Orchestre de Paris, where he encountered eminences like Pierre Boulez, Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim.
Solti passed down a bit of wisdom for conductors he had heard from Richard Strauss: Go into the hall to listen. Langrée doesn’t always need to do that, though, because he leans on the ears of his assistants, like Samuel Lee in Cincinnati. Langrée said that Lee “knows what I like,” and turned back to check in with him often during the May rehearsals, asking about articulation and whether specific textures were coming through.
Starting in the early 1990s, Langrée began to pick up podium appointments in Europe, including at the Opéra National de Lyon and Glyndebourne Touring Opera. He said that his children practically grew up at Glyndebourne, in England; his daughter, Céleste, is now studying scenic design at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, he added, because she was brought up by stage hands instead of nannies.
Langrée first conducted the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra in 1998, in a program that included Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor. He still remembers details of those rehearsals — working with the ensemble to perfect the style of a minuet by way of connecting the piece to “West Side Story” — and of quickly developing a relationship with the players, who were assembled from a variety of sources, like Lincoln Center institutions and Broadway.
In 2002, he was appointed music director after the departure of the orchestra’s longtime conductor, Gerard Schwarz, and a strike that left the players’ morale battered. The ensemble was no critic’s favorite, but once Langrée took over, “he put his heart and soul into every aspect” of it, said Jane Moss, who shepherded Lincoln Center’s artistic programming from 1992 until 2020.
The orchestra, and the Mostly Mozart Festival, flourished under the leadership of Moss and Langrée. He hired most of the ensemble in its current form — he is particularly proud of Ryan Roberts, “this genius” from the New York Philharmonic, who recently joined as principal oboe — and steadily turned it into a powerhouse of Classical style.
At the same time, the festival’s repertoire broadened, the programming including contemporary music; idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary performance; and international hits like George Benjamin’s opera “Written on Skin” and Barrie Kosky’s staging of “The Magic Flute.” The ambition, Moss said, flowed from her and Langrée’s relationship as “muses to each other.”
“She needed me, and I needed her,” Langrée said. Moss agreed, adding: “We fed each other a very special energy. And that came through to the audience. It was about communicating how much he loved music. It was a golden age, and he was really its star.”
When Langrée took over in Cincinnati in 2013, he moved his family there based on advice he had heard from Simon Rattle about his time with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Rattle, he recalled, told him: “If you want to have a deep experience as a music director, you should live in the city. It’s more than conducting many concerts or programs. You have to understand the power and weakness of the city, and think about how the orchestra can be part of the solutions.”
Choosing to live in Cincinnati, said Martin, the orchestra’s chief executive, “inevitably led to roots growing out into the community.” Langrée was even an active parent at Walnut Hills High School — where Céleste was involved in theater and his son, Antoine, played in the band; and where he conducted the school orchestra several times. He was tickled by the fact that he worked in the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood of the city, given that he was born “over the Rhine” in Alsace.
Living there also meant that Langrée was present to see the Cincinnati Symphony through the darkest days of the pandemic shutdown; he devised ways, almost immediately, to commission new music and stream concerts for free online. “The thing that was important to Louis was to keep things going,” Martin said.
The Cincinnati Symphony today, as with the Mostly Mozart orchestra, is largely a product of Langrée’s efforts. He was actively involved in the renovation of its home theater, Music Hall, and has hired, Martin said, “somewhere between a third and half” of the players. The ensemble has built a reputation on nurturing new works on the scale of concertos and symphonies; 65 of those were led by Langrée during his directorship. And, crucially, the group is performing at a level of excellence that reflects his taste for color and nuance.
“He’s set a high bar,” Martin said. “It’s not going to be easy to find someone at least as good.”
Langrée told the Cincinnati Symphony in 2021 that he wouldn’t renew his contract there beyond the 2023-24 season. That year, he was hired by President Emmanuel Macron of France to run the Opéra Comique; it was, Langrée said, the first job he had ever applied for.
His departure from Mostly Mozart, though, was blurrier. His contract there was set to conclude this summer, but there was no formal announcement about whether he would renew. The festival had gone dark in 2020, and by the time it would have come back, last year, Lincoln Center had a new artistic leader, Shanta Thake, who rolled out a summer series that included no festival proper and fewer performances than before by the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. The 2019 edition was unceremoniously the festival’s last. How, Langrée said, could he renew for something that doesn’t exist?
Langrée didn’t want to say more about the end of his Mostly Mozart tenure — by any measure a triumph of ensemble-building and musical curiosity. He wanted to protect the players, and for the orchestra to continue. Recently, Jonathon Heyward was made its music director, an appointment that came with the news that the group’s name would change.
Thake said that, as a New Yorker who knows the Mostly Mozart orchestra as a beloved New York institution, she can see that going into Langrée’s final season, “they’re stronger than ever.” And there are still echt Langrée performances to come, like a pairing of Mozart’s C-minor Mass and a premiere by Amir ElSaffar, beginning July 25.
Langrée moved to Paris once he started at the Opéra Comique, and when he is working in the United States, his day begins early, with about three hours of meetings before rehearsal starts. It’s a challenge, but in the future, he will conduct less: Beyond his concerts in Cincinnati next season, he has only a couple of guest appearances.
In lieu of score study, he is now getting acquainted with the nonartistic side of his field, stressed now not about orchestral concerts, but about, say, the effect of inflation on the cost of running a theater.
“It’s the last major project of my life,” he said of his job with the Opéra Comique. He will conduct one production there each season. And, as a guest, he will lead a “much-reduced repertoire” that he wants to explore more deeply than he could as a music director. Those moments, which he referred to as a “luxury,” will almost be the easy part of his career’s new phase.
“I come from a musical background,” Langrée said. “When you have to read these Excel things and have to balance budgets and work with subsidies from the government — now, I feel like I’ve been plunged into real life. And that’s hard.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
