Raphaël Pichon

Biography

Raphaël Pichon began his musical training in violin, piano and voice. As a young professional singer, he appeared under the direction of such personalities as Jordi Savall, Gustav Leonhardt and Ton Koopman, and as a member of Les Cris de Paris.

In 2006, he founded Pygmalion, a choir and a period-instrument orchestra that swiftly attracted attention for the originality of its projects. Bach’s Missae Breves, the late versions of Rameau’s great tragédies lyriques, and programmes placing Mozart rarities in perspective are among the productions that formed the basis of Pygmalion’s identity, through work centred on the fusion between choir and orchestra and a dramaturgical approach to concert performance.

Among their most significant projects in recent years have been the creation of Trauernacht on music by J. S. Bach, directed by Katie Mitchell (2014); the rediscovery of Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo at the Opéra National de Lorraine and the Opéra Royal du Château de Versailles (2016); the spatialisation of Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine with Pierre Audi at the Holland Festival (2017); a staged version of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem by Jochen Sandig in Bordeaux’s Base Sous-marine (2021); staged productions of Die Zauberflöte by Simon McBurney (2018) and Mozart’s Requiem by Romeo Castellucci (2019) at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence; Delibes’s Lakmé at the Opéra Comique in a production de Laurent Pelly (2022); a Schubert programme entitled Mein Traum with the baritone Stéphane Degout; and Mendelssohn’s Elias and Symphony no.2, Lobgesang.

In 2020, Raphaël Pichon created the Pulsations festival in Bordeaux, an eclectic and polymorphous celebration, programming concerts of an exceptional nature in unexpected venues.

From 2024, in partnership with Arte and France Musique, he will set out with Pygmalion on ‘Les Chemins de Bach’. On foot and on bicycle, they will recreate the initiatory journey that Bach undertook between Arnstadt and Lübeck at the age of twenty.

As a guest conductor, Raphaël Pichon has appeared with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester at the Berlin Philharmonie, La Scintilla at Opernhaus Zürich, the Freiburger Barockorchester, the SWR Symphonieorchester, the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra of Boston and the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg, among others. In 2023 he made his debut with the Wiener Philharmoniker at the Salzburg Festival. Highlights of his 2024/25 season include debuts with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and with the Orchestra of St Luke’s at Carnegie Hall. In the opera house, he has conducted at La Monnaie in Brussels, the Bolshoi in Moscow, the Teatro San Carlo in Naples and Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam.

Raphaël Pichon holds the rank of Officier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.