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Although it does not have the long history of other European orchestras, the Orchestre de Paris has attracted top talent and played a major role in the cultural life of the French capital since its founding in 1967. The orchestra also has an associated choir, the Chœur de l'Orchestre de Paris, that was established in 1976 and has been highly regarded. The Orchestre de Paris was founded after the demise of the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, which dated back to 1828 but had encountered financial difficulties. One of that group's former conductors, Charles Munch, held the auditions for the new orchestra and employed 50 members of the older group; the majority of its members, however, were new, and the orchestra owed its high quality from the start to the stature of Munch, who died in 1968 and was succeeded, as musical advisor rather than as permanent music director, by Herbert von Karajan. Concerts during the orchestra's first several years of existence featured top guest soloists such as Mstislav Rostropovich. The following music directors were of uniformly prestigious stature, including Georg Solti (1972-1975), Daniel Barenboim (1975-1989), Semyon Bychkov (1989-1998), Christoph von Dohnányi (1998-2000, another artistic advisor), Christoph Eschenbach (2000-2010), Paavo Järvi (2010-2016), and Daniel Harding (2016-2019). Principal guest conductor since 2016 has been Thomas Hengelbrock. The orchestra's concert life has been centered in Paris, but its headquarters have moved several times over its comparatively short existence. The orchestra's concerts took place for many years at the venerable Salle Pleyel hall, which was sold in 1998 and finally mothballed in 2002. For several years the orchestra moved among the Théâtre du Chatelet, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, and, briefly, the renovated Salle Pleyel. In 2015 the orchestra moved into the new Philharmonie de Paris and has become its resident ensemble. The Orchestre de Paris has had a long recording career, including a 1982 recording of Ravel's Boléro that made the pop charts in the Netherlands. The group has recorded mostly for Deutsche Grammophon, Philips, Erato, Warner Classics, and Harmonia Mundi, for which it participated in a recording of Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat in 2018. ~ James Manheim

Igor Stravinsky was one of music's truly epochal innovators; no other composer of the 20th century exerted such a pervasive influence or dominated his art in the way that Stravinsky did during his seven-decade musical career. Aside from purely technical considerations such as rhythm and harmony, the most important hallmark of Stravinsky's style is, indeed, its changing face. Emerging from the spirit of late Russian nationalism and ending his career with a thorny, individual language steeped in 12-tone principles, Stravinsky assumed a number of aesthetic guises throughout the course of his development while always retaining a distinctive, essential identity.

Although he was the son of one of the Mariinsky Theater's principal basses and a talented amateur pianist, Stravinsky had no more musical training than that of any other Russian upper-class child. He entered law school but also began private composition and orchestration studies with Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. By 1909, the orchestral works Scherzo fantastique and Fireworks had impressed Sergei Diaghilev enough for him to ask Stravinsky to orchestrate -- and subsequently compose -- ballets for his company. Stravinsky's triad of early ballets -- The Firebird (1909-1910), Petrushka (1910-1911), and most importantly, The Rite of Spring (1911-1913) -- did more to establish his reputation than any of his other works; indeed, the riot which followed the premiere of The Rite is one of the most notorious events in music history.

Stravinsky and his family spent the war years in Switzerland, returning to France in 1920. His jazz-inflected essays of the 1910s and 1920s -- notably, Ragtime (1918) and The Soldier's Tale (1918) -- gave way to one of the composer's most influential aesthetic turns. The neo-Classical tautness of works as diverse as the ballet Pulcinella (1919-1920), the Symphony of Psalms (1930), and, decades later, the opera The Rake's Progress (1948-1951) made a widespread impact and had a special influence upon the fledgling school of American composers that looked to Stravinsky as its primary model. He had begun touring as a conductor and pianist, generally performing his own works. In the 1930s, he toured the Americas and wrote several pieces fulfilling American commissions, including the Concerto in E flat, "Dumbarton Oaks."

After the deaths of his daughter, his wife, and his mother within a period of less than a year, Stravinsky emigrated to America, settling in California with his second wife in 1940. His works between 1940 and 1950 show a mixture of styles but still seem centered on Russian or French traditions. Stravinsky's cultural perspective changed after Robert Craft became his musical assistant, handling rehearsals for Stravinsky, traveling with him, and later, co-authoring his memoirs. Craft is credited with helping Stravinsky accept 12-tone composition as one of the tools of his trade. Characteristically, though, he made novel use of such principles in his own music, producing works in a highly original vein: Movements (1958-1959) for piano and orchestra, Variations: Aldous Huxley in Memoriam (1963), and the Requiem Canticles (1965-1966) are among the most striking. Craft prepared the musicians for the exemplary series of Columbia Records LPs Stravinsky conducted through the stereo era, covering virtually all his significant works. Despite declining health in his last years, Stravinsky continued to compose until just before his death in April 1971. ~ TiVo Staff

Conductor Klaus Mäkelä emerged rapidly in the late 2010s and early 2020s to become one of the most prominent figures on the musical scene in Scandinavia and beyond. In 2024, at the age of just 28, he was named future chief conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Mäkelä was born in Helsinki on January 17, 1996. His family was musical: his father, Sami Mäkelä, was a violinist, and his mother, Taru Myöhänen-Mäkela, was a pianist. At 12, as a singer in the chorus of the Finnish National Opera, Klaus became interested in conducting. He studied both conducting and cello at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. His conducting teacher there was Jorma Panula, and he took cello courses with Hannu Kiiski, Timo Hanhinen, and Marko Ylönen. For a time, as Mäkelä made concerto appearances with top regional orchestras around Finland, such as the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, the Kuopio Symphony Orchestra, and the Jyväskylä Sinfonia, it seemed as though he might choose a career path as a cellist. He performed on cello in chamber groups and appeared at several leading Finnish music festivals.

He then made a guest-conducting appearance with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in September of 2017. After that single appearance, Mäkelä was hired as the orchestra's principal guest conductor, beginning with the 2018-2019 season. He was the youngest individual ever to hold a post with a conductor title in that organization. The pattern repeated itself when Mäkelä guest conducted the Oslo Philharmonic, and he was appointed chief conductor for a term beginning in 2020. His contract was extended by four years before he had even assumed his post. His meteoric rise reached another stage after he made a guest appearance with the Orchestre de Paris in June of 2019; a year later, the orchestra named him music director, beginning in 2022. Mäkelä also became the artistic director of Finland's Turku Music Festival in 2018. He has served as an Artist in Association with the Tapiola Sinfonietta.

In addition to these regular posts, Mäkelä has made guest appearances with a variety of world-class ensembles. In 2022, the year he released his debut album (a complete set of the Sibelius symphonies with the Oslo Philharmonic), he was named artistic partner of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, with a five-year term as chief conductor set to begin in 2027. His profile was raised still higher by a romantic relationship with star pianist Yuja Wang, but the couple split up in early 2024. In 2023 and 2024, Mäkelä issued two albums of music by Stravinsky with the Orchestre de Paris on the Decca label. In 2024, after first guest-conducting the group two years earlier, he became the music director-designate of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, succeeding Riccardo Muti. His initial five-year contract was set to begin in 2027. ~ James Manheim

Claude Debussy (born Achille-Claude Debussy) was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His mature compositions, distinctive and appealing, combined modernism and sensuality so successfully that their sheer beauty often obscures their technical innovation. Debussy is considered the founder and leading exponent of musical Impressionism (although he resisted the label), and his adoption of non-traditional scales and tonal structures was paradigmatic for many composers who followed.

The son of a shopkeeper and a seamstress, Debussy began piano studies at the Paris Conservatory at the age of 11. While a student there, he encountered the wealthy Nadezhda von Meck (most famous as Tchaikovsky's patroness), who employed him as a music teacher to her children; through travel, concerts and acquaintances, she provided him with a wealth of musical experience. Most importantly, she exposed the young Debussy to the works of Russian composers, such as Borodin and Mussorgsky, who would remain important influences on his music.

Debussy began composition studies in 1880, and in 1884 he won the prestigious Prix de Rome with his cantata L'enfant prodigue. This prize financed two years of further study in Rome -- years that proved to be creatively frustrating. However, the period immediately following was fertile for the young composer; trips to Bayreuth and the Paris World Exhibition (1889) established, respectively, his determination to move away from the influence of Richard Wagner, and his interest in the music of Eastern cultures.

After a relatively bohemian period, during which Debussy formed friendships with many leading Parisian writers and musicians (not least of which were Mallarmé, Satie, and Chausson), the year 1894 saw the enormously successful premiere of his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun) -- a truly revolutionary work that brought his mature compositional voice into focus. His seminal opera Pelléas et Mélisande, completed the next year, would become a sensation at its first performance in 1902. The impact of those two works earned Debussy widespread recognition (as well as frequent attacks from critics, who failed to appreciate his forward-looking style), and over the first decade of the 20th century he established himself as the leading figure in French music -- so much so that the term "Debussysme" ("Debussyism"), used both positively and pejoratively, became fashionable in Paris. Debussy spent his remaining healthy years immersed in French musical society, writing as a critic, composing, and performing his own works internationally. He succumbed to colon cancer in 1918, having also suffered a deep depression brought on by the onset of World War I.

Debussy's personal life was punctuated by unfortunate incidents, most famously the attempted suicide of his first wife, Lilly Texier, whom he abandoned for the singer Emma Bardac. However, his subsequent marriage to Bardac, and their daughter Claude-Emma, whom they called "Chouchou" and who became the dedicatee of the composer's Children's Corner piano suite, provided the middle-aged Debussy with great personal joys.

Debussy wrote successfully in most every genre, adapting his distinctive compositional language to the demands of each. His orchestral works, of which Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and La mer (The Sea, 1905) are most familiar, established him as a master of instrumental color and texture. It is this attention to tone color -- his layering of sound upon sound so that they blend to form a greater, evocative whole -- that linked Debussy in the public mind to the Impressionist painters.

His works for solo piano, particularly his collections of Préludes and Etudes, which have remained staples of the repertoire since their composition, bring into relief his assimilation of elements from both Eastern cultures and antiquity -- especially pentatonicism (the use of five-note scales), modality (the use of scales from ancient Greece and the medieval church), parallelism (the parallel movement of chords and lines), and the whole-tone scale (formed by dividing the octave into six equal intervals).

Pelléas et Mélisande and his collections of songs for solo voice establish the strength of his connection to French literature and poetry, especially the symbolist writers, and stand as some of the most understatedly expressive works in the repertory. The writings of Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Baudelaire, and his childhood friend Paul Verlaine appear prominently among his chosen texts and joined symbiotically with the composer's own unique moods and forms of expression. ~ Allen Schrott