Ravinia 2025 Issue 5

His other mentor at the Opéra National de Lyon was anoth- er 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 conjure a mix of the two. “That forces you to find your own style and language and to ques- tion 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 invita- tion of Bychkov, who had just become music director. After three years there, his 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, the conductor took over as a music director of the Cincinnati Symphony, giving him a fall-to-spring post to com- plement 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 the Ohio burg. “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 in- formed 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 com- pany long presented only works that combined singing and spoken dialogue, what the Germans call Singspiel . “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, there are other exam- ples, like soprano Beverly Sills, who was general director of the New York City Opera in 1979–89 and, later, chair of Lin- coln Center. In any case, he jumped at the chance, drawing on his background as music director of the Opéra National “ I rememberSemyon  [ Bychkov ] tellingme,  ‘Becareful,becauseif  you’rearealconductor,  youwon’tbeabletostop,  tolivewithout it.’ ” RAVINIAMAGAZINE • AUG. 4 – AUG. 17, 2025 14 THISPAGEANDPREVIOUS:CHRISLEE