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The 2010-11 season sees Paavo Järvi assume his new role as Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, taking over from Christoph Eschenbach, who spent 10 years with the orchestra, and following in the footsteps of figures such as Charles Munch, Herbert von Karajan, Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim. Marking the launch of this collaboration, Virgin Classics is releasing a program of orchestral works by Bizet, the first recording from this leading French orchestra and its Estonian-born conductor.
To date, Järvi’s Virgin Classics recordings have focused on music by Nordic and Russian composers, and – in his recent work with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra – Mahler and Brahms. Now, with the Orchestre de Paris, he presents a program by Bizet, a quintessentially French composer. The release comprises the vernal Symphony in C, written when Bizet was still a teenager, the delightful suite Jeux d’Enfants (Children’s Games), and the composer’s second symphony, Roma, a work he revised on a number of occasions, and which is rarely heard.
