Orchestre National de France program

PROGRAM

ELSA BARRAINE (1910-1999)

CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS (1770-1827)

Symphony No. 2

I. Adagrio-Allegro moderato

II. Marche funèbre

III. Finale: Allegretto

Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22

I. Andante sostenuto

II. Allegro scherzando

III. Presto

DANIIL TRIFONOV, PIANO

INTERMISSION

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)

MAURICE RAVEL (1875-1937)

Piano Concerto in G major

I. Allegramente

II. Adagio assai

III. Presto

DANIIL TRIFONOV, PIANO

Daphnis et Chloé: Suite No. 2

NOTES ON THE PROGRAM

Symphony No. 2

ELSA BARRAINE

Born: February 13, 1910, Paris, France

Died: March 20, 1999, Strasbourg, France

Composed in 1938, Elsa Barraine’s Symphony No. 2 bears the subtitle “Voïna,” the Russian word for “war.” Written on the eve of World War II, the work is both a personal and political statement, reflecting the tension, grief, and defiance of a world on the brink of conflict.

The symphony opens with a solemn Lento that erupts into a fiercely rhythmic Allegro, where driving motives and bold orchestral colors convey a sense of struggle. A stark Marche funèbre follows, somber and introspective, its restrained lyricism evoking mourning and loss. The finale, marked Allegretto, offers a fragile sense of hope; its buoyant dance rhythms suggesting renewal and resilience, even as shadows from earlier movements linger.

Compact and deeply expressive, Barraine’s three-movement symphony showcases her command of structure, orchestration, and emotional clarity. A student of Paul Dukas and an active member of the French Resistance, Barraine was one of the few prominent women composers in 20th-century France. Symphony No. 2 stands as a powerful testament to her artistry and moral conviction—a musical portrait of humanity under pressure, resolved in courage and light.

Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22

CAMILLE SAINT-SAËNS

Born: October 9, 1835, Paris, France

Died: December 16, 1921, Algiers, Algeria

Composed in just 17 days in 1868, Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 2 remains one of his most beloved and dazzling works. Written for and premiered by the composer himself with Anton Rubinstein conducting, the concerto is celebrated for its wit, virtuosity, and bold reversals of character. These qualities made it an instant audience favorite.

The opening movement begins unusually, with a long, improvisatory solo piano introduction reminiscent of Bach, reflecting Saint-Saëns’s reverence for Baroque counterpoint, before exploding into a fiery Romantic drama. The second movement, a playful Allegro scherzando, sparkles with fleet, crystalline passagework and effortless charm. The finale, a whirlwind Presto in the style of a tarantella, hurtles forward with rhythmic brilliance and breathtaking pianistic flair.

Blending French elegance with Lisztian bravura, Saint-Saëns demonstrates both his formidable pianism and his gift for orchestral color. The Concerto No. 2’s quicksilver shifts, from solemnity to joy, from Classical poise to virtuosic exuberance, make it one of the most exhilarating showpieces in the Romantic repertoire.

Piano Concerto in G major

MAURICE RAVEL

Born: March 7, 1835, Ciboure, France

Died: December 28, 1937, Paris, France

Written between 1929 and 1931, Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major stands as one of the composer’s most sparkling and accessible works. Inspired by his fascination with jazz, which was newly discovered during his 1928 tour of the United States, the concerto blends French elegance with the rhythmic vitality and harmonic daring of the Jazz Age. Ravel originally intended to perform the premiere himself but, due to declining health, ultimately entrusted it to pianist Marguerite Long, who debuted the work in Paris in 1932 with Ravel conducting.

The opening movement, marked Allegramente, begins with a whip crack and bursts into a lively, jazz-inflected atmosphere filled with syncopation, bright orchestral colors, and virtuosic flourishes. The central Adagio assai provides a striking contrast: a long, singing piano melody unfolds over gentle accompaniment, recalling Mozart’s lyricism and Ravel’s gift for sustained beauty. The finale, Presto, is an exhilarating tour de force that is brilliant, quicksilver, and rhythmically charged, bringing the concerto to a dazzling conclusion.

Radiant and refined, the Concerto in G major captures Ravel’s unique voice at the crossroads of classical tradition and modern invention, a vivid celebration of wit, clarity, and joy in sound.

Daphnis et Chloé: Suite No. 2

MAURICE RAVEL

Composed between 1909 and 1912 for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé is often described by the composer as a “symphonie chorégraphique” (a choreographic symphony). Drawn from the ancient Greek tale of two shepherds whose love triumphs through trials and divine intervention, the complete ballet stands among Ravel’s most ambitious scores. From it he later fashioned two concert suites; Suite No. 2 (1913) presents the ballet’s radiant final scenes in self-contained symphonic form.

The suite opens with Lever du jour (Daybreak), one of Ravel’s most luminous orchestral depictions: birdsong, rippling harps, and shimmering strings evoke the gradual awakening of nature. The central Pantomime unfolds as Daphnis and

Chloé’s tender reunion, its flowing clarinet solo and sensuous harmonies building to passionate release. The concluding Danse générale erupts in ecstatic celebration which is wildly rhythmic, dazzling in orchestral color, and irresistibly kinetic.

Rich in impressionistic color and rhythmic vitality, Suite No. 2 distills Ravel’s genius for atmosphere and orchestral brilliance, culminating in one of the most exhilarating finales in all of French music.

MEET THE ARTISTS

CRISTIAN M Ă CELARU

GRAMMY® Award-winning conductor Cristian Măcelaru is Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Music Director of the Orchestre National de France, Artistic Director of the George Enescu International Festival and Competition, Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Interlochen Center for the Arts’ World Youth Symphony Orchestra, Music Director and Conductor of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and Distinguished Visiting Artist at The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. He also serves as Artistic Partner of the WDR Sinfonieorchester in Cologne, where he was Chief Conductor from the 2019/20 through 2024/25 seasons.

Măcelaru’s 2025/26 guest engagements include debuts with the Münchner Philharmoniker and Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, as well as returns with Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Czech Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony.

Măcelaru’s previous seasons include European engagements with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, NDR Elbphilharmonie, Concertgebouworkest, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Budapest Festival Orchestra and Wiener Symphoniker. In North America, he has led the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra and The Cleveland Orchestra. He is equally at home as a conductor of opera, with career highlights including productions of Don Giovanni with the Houston Grand Opera and Madama Butterfly with Opera Națională București.

In 2020, Măcelaru received a GRAMMY® Award for conducting the Decca Classics recording of Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto with Nicola Benedetti and the Philadelphia Orchestra. His highly anticipated recording of George Enescu’s complete symphonic works with the Orchestre National de France was released in April 2024 on Deutsche Grammophon. September 2025 marked the release of Măcelaru’s and the Orchestre National de France’s Ravel Paris 2025 album on the naïve label, featuring the symphonic works of Maurice Ravel in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth.

DANIIL TRIFONOV

Grammy Award-winning pianist Daniil Trifonov (dan-EEL TREE-fon-ov) is a solo artist, champion of the concerto repertoire, chamber and vocal collaborator, and composer. Combining consummate technique with rare sensitivity and depth, his performances are a perpetual source of wonder to audiences and critics alike. He won the Grammy

Award for Best Instrumental Solo Album of 2018 with Transcendental, the Liszt collection that marked his third title as an exclusive Deutsche Grammophon artist.

Trifonov’s 2025-26 season includes three programs at Carnegie Hall. First, he performs Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin with German baritone Matthias Goerne, crowning a transatlantic tour of the composer’s great song cycles that also takes the duo from Toronto, Boston, and Washington, D.C. to Paris, Leipzig, and Vienna. Next at the New York venue, Trifonov joins Cristian Mǎcelaru and the Orchestre National de France for two major French concertos: Saint-Saëns’s Second and Ravel’s jazz-inflected Concerto in G. Finally, he returns to Carnegie Hall for a mainstage solo recital of Schumann, Myaskovsky, Taneyev, and Prokofiev, with which program he tours Europe and the U.S. throughout the season. Other highlights include a European tour with Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider; Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with both the Cleveland Orchestra and Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia; and Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto with both the Cincinnati and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. Trifonov also explores Tchaikovsky’s more intimate side on a new double album, Tchaikovsky, released by Deutsche Grammophon in October 2025.

Trifonov’s existing Deutsche Grammophon discography includes 2024’s My American Story: North, which received the UK’s Presto Music Award; the Grammy-nominated live recording of his Carnegie recital debut; Chopin Evocations; Silver Age, for which he received Opus Klassik’s Instrumentalist of the Year/Piano award; the best-selling, Grammy-nominated double album Bach: The Art of Life; and three volumes of Rachmaninov works with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, of which two received Grammy nominations and the third won BBC Music’s 2019 Concerto Recording of the Year. Named Gramophone’s 2016 Artist of the Year and Musical America’s 2019 Artist of the Year, Trifonov was made a “Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” by the French government in 2021.

During the 2010-11 season, Trifonov won medals at three of the music world’s most prestigious competitions: Third Prize in Warsaw’s Chopin Competition, First Prize in Tel Aviv’s Rubinstein Competition, and both First Prize and Grand Prix in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition. He studied with Sergei Babayan at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

ORCHESTRE NATIONAL DE FRANCE

CRISTIAN M Ă CELARU, MUSIC DIRECTOR

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.

After the Second World War, Manuel Rosenthal, André Cluytens and Jean Martinon, among others, enriched this tradition, magnified by successive musical directors (Lorin Maazel, Charles Dutoit, Kurt Masur, Daniele Gatti, Emmanuel Krivine) and regular guests (Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa...). On September 1, 2020, Cristian Măcelaru took over as Music Director of the Orchestre National de France.

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.

Numerous recordings by the orchestra are commercially available. 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 for Warner Classics. Finally, a boxed set of George Enescu’s symphonies conducted by Cristian Măcelaru was released in 2024 by Deutsche Grammophon, and a box set of Maurice Ravel’s orchestral works by the Orchestre National de France and Cristian Măcelaru was released in September 2025 by Naïve Records.

Cristian Măcelaru and the Orchestre National de France recently appeared at the Paris 2024 Olympics Opening Ceremony, which was broadcast to 1.5 billion viewers worldwide.

ORCHESTRE NATIONAL DE FRANCE

CRISTIAN M Ă CELARU

Music Director

JOHANNES NEUBERT

General Manager

FIRST VIOLINS

Luc Héry, leader

Sarah Nemtanu, leader

Elisabeth Glab, assistant leader

Bertrand Cervera, sub-leader

Lyodoh Kaneko, sub-leader

Catherine Bourgeat

Nathalie Chabot

Marc-Olivier de Nattes

Claudine Garcon

Xavier Guilloteau

Stéphane Henoch

Jérôme Marchand

Khoï Nam Nguyen Huu

Agnès Quennesson

Caroline Ritchot

David Rivière

Véronique Rougelot

Nicolas Vaslier

SECOND VIOLINS

Florence Binder*

Laurent Manaud-Pallas*

Nguyen Nguyen Huu**

Young Eun Koo**

Ghislaine Benabdallah

Gaétan Biron

Hector Burgan

Magali Costes˚

Laurence del Vescovo

Benjamin Estienne

Mathilde Gheorghiu

You-Jung Han

Claire Hazera-Morand

Khoa-Nam Nguyen˚

Ji-Hwan Park Song

Anne Porquet

Gaëlle Spieser

Rieho Yu

VIOLAS

Nicolas Bône*

Allan Swieton*

Teodor Coman**

Corentin Bordelot***

Cyril Bouffyesse***

Julien Barbe

Emmanuel Blanc

Adeliya Chamrina

Louise Desjardins

Christine Jaboulay

Élodie Laurent

Ingrid Lormand

Noémie Prouille-Guézénec

Paul Radais

CELLOS

Raphaël Perraud*

Aurélienne Brauner*

Alexandre Giordan**

Florent Carriere***

Oana Unc***

Carlos Dourthé

Renaud Malaury

Emmanuel Petit

Marlène Rivière

Emma Savouret

Laure Vavasseur

Pierre Vavasseur

DOUBLE BASSES

Maria Chirokoliyska*

Jean-Edmond Bacquet**

Grégoire Blin***

Thomas Garoche***

Jean-Olivier Bacquet

Tom Laffolay

Stéphane Logerot

Venancio Rodrigues

Françoise Verhaeghe

FLUTES

Silvia Careddu*

Joséphine Poncelin de Raucourt*

Michel Moragues**

Patrice Kirchhoff

PICCOLO

Édouard Sabo*

OBOES

Thomas Hutchinson*

Mathilde Lebert*

Nancy Andelfinger

Alexandre Worms

COR ANGLAIS

Laurent Decker*

CLARINETS

Carlos Ferreira*

Patrick Messina*

Christelle Pochet

E-FLAT CLARINET

Jessica Bessac*

BASS CLARINET

Renaud Guy-Rousseau*

BASSOONS

Marie Boichard*

Philippe Hanon*

Frédéric Durand

Elisabeth Kissel

CONTRABASSOON

Lomic Lamouroux*

HORNS

Alexander Edmunson*˚

Julien Mange*˚

François Christin

Antoine Morisot

Jean Pincemin

Jean-Paul Quennesson

Jocelyn Willem

TRUMPETS

Rémi Joussemet*

Andreï Kavalinski*

Dominique Brunet

Grégoire Méa

CORNET

Alexandre Oliveri*

TROMBONES

Jean-Philippe Navrez*

Julien Dugers**

Olivier Devaure

Sébastien Larrère

TUBAS

Bernard Neuranter

TIMPANI

François Desforges*

PERCUSSION

Emmanuel Curt* Florent Jodelet

Gilles Rancitelli

HARP

Emilie Gastaud*

PIANO/CÉLESTA

Franz Michel

*Principal

**Assistant Principal

***Sub-principal

˚ Musician in the process of becoming tenured

ADMINISTRATOR

Solène Grégoire-Marzin

HEAD OF ARTISTIC PLANNING

Constance Clara Guibert

PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION MANAGER

Céline Meyer

PRINCIPAL ORCHESTRA MANAGER

Alexander Morel

DEPUTY PRINCIPAL ORCHESTRA MANAGER / TOURING MANAGER

Valérie Robert

PRODUCTION MANAGER

Victoria Lefèvre

ORCHESTRA MANAGERS

Nicolas Jehlé

François-Pierre Kuess

HEAD OF MEDIA RELATIONS

François Arveiller

MUSICIAN FOR EDUCATION AND CULTURAL PROGRAMMES

Marc-Olivier de Nattes

EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL PROJECTS MANAGER

Camille Cuvier

ASSISTANT TO THE MUSIC DIRECTOR

Thibault Denisty

MUSIC PRODUCTION AND PLANNING MANAGER

Catherine Nicolle

LOGISTICS AND MUSIC PLANNING MANAGER

William Manzoni

INSTRUMENT INVENTORY

Emmanuel Martin

MUSICAL FACILITIES MANAGERS

Philémon Dubois

Thomas Goffinet

Nicolas Guerreau

Sarah-Jane Jegou

Amadéo Kotlarski

Serge Kurek

LIBRARIAN MANAGER

Noémie Larrieu

ASSISTANT LIBRARIAN MANAGER

Marie de Vienne

LIBRARIANS

Adèle Bertin

Pablo Rodrigo Casado

Marine Duverlie

Aria Guillotte

Maria-Ines Revollo