MARC TRAUTMANN

Conductor

 

With a repertoire ranging from the great baroque to contemporary world premieres, the reputation of Maestro Marc Trautmann is second to none...  He has conducted brilliantly both on the operatic and on the concert stage. His accurate, taut and nonteheless flexible conducting brings out exactly the profoundness of the scores, which he conveys to the musicians and singers with forceful yet quiet ease and attention. Maestro Trautmann has been nominated in 2022 : Conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of Hawkesbury.

 

Marc Trautmann was born in Bordeaux. After having studied at the Paris National Conservatoire and with Sergiù Celibidache at the Munich Philharmonic, he made his professionnal conducting debut aged 24 as the Assistant Conductor at the Orchestre Philharmonique des Pays de Loire in France. He then was engaged as the assistant conductor at the Paris Bastille Opera where he worked on several major international productions, among which Peter Sellars’ spectacular staging of Messiaen’s mammoth opera Saint François d’Assise  with José van Dam, Dawn Upshaw and John Aller a.o.

Marc Trautmann’s repertoire spans from the early baroque – where he takes pleasure in conducting some operas such as Dido and Aeneas or L’incoronazione di Poppea from the harpsichord continuo, old style – to the most recent contemporary world premieres, be it in the symphonic or operatic realms. Furthermore, he is often called to conduct rare or particularly complex works, as much for his purely artistic capacities as for his ability to federate the most eclectic and large teams.
 

His international career has led him to conduct all over Europe : in France (Paris, Strasbourg, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Nantes, Angers, Avignon), in Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, the Czech Republic, Hungary or Belarus. His furthest international ventures led him to the USA at Portland Opera where he guest-conducted for some ten years, as well as to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, China and Brazil.

Some special ventures :

Marc Trautmann has rebuilt the score and conducted the American premiere of Reynaldo Hahn’s Merchant of Venice with Alain Fondary as Shylock at Portland Opera, to huge international critical and public acclaim.He conducted the world premiere of Snow in August, by Chinese composer Xu ShuYa, libretto and staging by famous Nobel-Prize winner for Litterature, Gao Xing Jian, with the National Orchestra of Taiwan – the first-ever contemporary Western-style opera written in Chinese language – The masterpiece has been revived in January of 2005 by the Marseille Opera, to international acclaim and critical success. With the Orchestre National de Bordeaux, he conducted the world premiere of La voie écarlate by French composer Jacques Castérède, on a libretto by famous French philosopher Michel Serres. In Canada, he conducted the world premiere of the first-ever contemporary opera written for a modern Gamelan ensemble, the famous Toronto-based Evergreen Club : How it Storms by Alan Cole[1].

He conducted the music for Walt Disney’s Fantasia with the Orchestre Philharmonique des Pays de Loire substituting for the sound-track, live and synchronically with the picture. In July 2000 he supervised and conducted the first-ever tour of a major orchestra from Mainland China throughout France.
 

Further to his purely musical activities, he has translated dozens of  newly-discovered letters to and from Wilhelm Furtwängler from German to French, published by the Wilhelm Furtwängler Society. He also wrote some twenty-four explanatory liner notes for the celebrated Fur Dummies CD series : Mozart, Bach, Schubert, Beethoven, Wagner etc., as well as numerous liner notes for EMI, Warner, DGG, Erato and other worldwide record labels. As a side activity – and under an alias –, he enjoys writing boulevard theater pieces, some of which have been touring throughout France for months at a time.