The announcement took everyone by surprise! This Thursday, May 28, while the director of music at Radio France revealed how the house orchestras - the National Orchestra of France and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France - were going to find their way back to June 'auditorium (as part of a program of fourteen closed-door concerts), broadcast live on France Musique and Arte Concert, conductor Emmanuel Krivine has decided to return his baton as musical director of the national orchestra of France.
In its official press release, sent this morning, Radio France praised “the artistic commitment he has shown at the head of the orchestra since September 1, 2017 (...) During these three years, Emmanuel Krivine will have given with the Orchester National de France nearly seventy concerts, exploring a very large repertoire where Brahms, Strauss, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and French composers, in the forefront of which Ravel, Debussy, Berlioz, Franck and Saint-Saëns, will have been defended with a fervor and a singularity of interpretation which knew how to seduce the public and greatly contributed to the success of the Radio France Auditorium as well as to the musical excellence of the orchestra. ” The institution invokes for this resignation "personal reasons related to the health situation that the country is going through."
Season without captain
Health problem ? New commitments? Discouraged by the uncertainties hanging over the next season? We don't know much more for the moment. But the 73-year-old chef, the first Frenchman to occupy this position for almost half a century, should have started his last season in September at the desk of the radio phalanx, before giving way to Romanian Cristian Măcelaru . The early appointment, in November 2019, of this "young" 40-year-old chef almost unknown in France, at the time surprised almost as much as the unexpected resignation of Emmanuel Krivine. Today it looks like a great thing. Even if it does not seem envisaged that he will take up his post before the initially scheduled date of September 2021 , it gives a perspective of renewal to the phalanx, after a 2020-2021 season on which the shadow of the Covid-19 and its consequences will certainly still hover.
By then, this flagship of French music will probably have to sail, against all odds, without a captain. A situation which should not however be a problem for this elite formation, which had anyway only ten concerts planned with Emmanuel Krivine during a season anyway surely subject to change.
