Louis Langrée

Born in Mulhouse, France, on January 11, 1961, conductor Louis Langrée grew up in a musical household where his father Alain Langrée worked as an organist and choral director. He trained at the Strasbourg Conservatory yet never attended a single conducting course. Professional involvement began in 1983 when he joined the Opéra National de Lyon as a vocal coach. Later in the decade he served as assistant conductor at the Aix-en-Provence and Bayreuth Festivals before receiving an appointment in 1989 with the Orchestre de Paris. During the 1990s and 2000s he held music directorships at the Orchestre de Picardie, the Liège Philharmonic Orchestra, the Opéra National de Lyon, and the Glyndebourne Touring Opera, moving between orchestral and operatic organizations. His first recordings were made with the Orchestre de l'Opéra National de Lyon, which accompanied soprano Véronique Gens on the 2001 Virgin Classics release of Berlioz's Les nuits d'été.

An American debut came at the Spoleto Festival in 1991, after which stateside activity ceased until 2002, when he was appointed director of New York's Mostly Mozart Festival; the post continued through the late 2010s under an extension running until 2020. A single guest appearance with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra resulted in his engagement in 2012 as the ensemble's 13th music director, a post he retained into the mid-2020s. Although his discography includes various European groups on Virgin Classics, Cincinnati Symphony performances have appeared on the orchestra's own Fanfare Cincinnati imprint; every such release contains newly commissioned works, and Concertos for Orchestra earned a Grammy nomination for Best Orchestral Performance in 2017. The 2019 album Transatlantic: Gershwin, Varèse, Stravinsky, also recorded with the Cincinnati Symphony, received a further Grammy nomination. In 2023 he led the Orchestre National de France in a Ravel program of piano-and-orchestra music featuring pianist Alexandre Tharaud. Official French recognition arrived with his naming as Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2006 and Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2014. He is married to French television writer Aimée Clark Langrée; the couple has two children and lives in Cincinnati.