Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra at their peak in Mahler's "Ninth Symphony"

A beautiful season opening for the Philharmonie de Paris, which is programming a condensed but flamboyant symphonic festival entitled Les Prem's. The allusion to the popular BBC Proms in London, a summer event that brings together a large and festive audience at the Royal Albert Hall each year, is pushed to the point of relieving the large Pierre-Boulez hall of around ten of its first rows, thus offering spectators, as in London, some 700 standing places at the price of 15 euros. After two evenings with the Latvian conductor, Andris Nelsons , at the head of his Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, it is the turn of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to perform on Friday, September 5, under the baton of its musical and artistic director, the Russian-Austrian, Kirill Petrenko.

A relatively mysterious personality, this native of Omsk, Siberia, trained in Austria, whose career began in the pit of the Meiningen Opera then at the Komische Oper in Berlin before the very famous stage of the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich (2013-2020), from where he joined the prestigious Berlin phalanx, succeeding Sir Simon Rattle in 2019. Unlike his charismatic predecessor, the 53-year-old maestro immediately stood out for a media discretion bordering on extravagance in the age of social networks, but which endows the little man with a singular aura.

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