It was not overnight that the brilliant violinist Renaud Capuçon (Chambéry, 1976), brother of the also famous cellist Gautier Capuçon, decided to switch to the baton and combine his instrument with orchestral direction, as he has done since 2021 accept ownership of the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra. The itch to occupy the podium had entered him almost three decades ago, when he was the concertmaster of Claudio Abbado’s Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra. While on tour, the Milanese maestro one day asked him to conduct four or five minutes of the overture to Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. He wanted to listen. The young Renaud climbed to the podium terrified…
“The musicians played alone, of course, but musically it was something incredible, I felt at that precise moment that one day I would conduct,” he now confesses on the phone in conversation with La Vanguardia.
I wasn’t in a hurry, there were millions of things to do before getting there… “In fact, it was thanks to my wife, who five years ago encouraged me to take the plunge; Without it I would still be thinking that ‘it is better to wait because I respect the conductor’s place too much’ and all that stuff that you tell yourself when you don’t want to cross that border – he explains – because for a violinist it is a big step to go on stage without his instrument, psychologically it is something big.”
In any case, Capuçon combines the bow with the baton in many of his appearances, such as this week in Madrid and Barcelona leading the Swiss team. Today he performs at the National Auditorium within Ibermúsica and tomorrow at the Palau de la Música, as part of the BCN Clàssics. On the program, the Violin Concerto no. 5 by Mozart, in which he himself will be the soloist; He will then sit with the musicians in Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen and finally conduct Symphony No. from the podium. 1 by Beethoven. A whole range of aspects of his musical personality.
But what led the Lausanne band, one of the most sought-after in Europe, founded in 1942 by Victor Desarzens, to opt for a violinist who was entering the conducting arena for the first time?
In reality Capuçon was a strong candidate. “I always loved this orchestra, it is one of the best chamber ensembles in Europe. “We gave a concert, they voted for me and now we are living a love story,” he says. In some way, I don’t know, I’m a musician before I’m a violinist, I always considered myself a musician who played the violin. And throughout these 30 years I have conducted many chamber orchestras from the violin, I have done a lot of chamber music, which helps you talk about your conception and get people to understand you. I have also been directing festival programs for more than twenty years. I think all this time I was preparing for the current stage. “It has been something organic.”
Even so, he lives one challenge after another: the most recent has been conducting Martha Argerich in Schumann’s Piano Concerto, Schubert’s 9th, Fauré’s Requiem… “I live it as the continuation of my musical life that began with 4 years and I’m already turning 48. I’m getting old!” he jokes.
As a violinist, Capuçon has been free and has been guided more by his instinct than by the strict fashions of containing expressivity, less vibrato, no portamento…
“There have always been fashions in music,” he points out. There was a time when Bach was played as if it were Tchaikovsky, with slides, portamentos… thank God, in recent decades the Harnoncourts and Leonhardts revised the original manuscripts. For the last 15 years it has been difficult for a symphony orchestra to play Bach: it was reserved for ensembles, but luckily this is no longer the case. I learned a lot from Harnoncourt and also from playing premieres of living composers: all of that has given me knowledge to later make Brahms or Schubert. It’s interesting to keep an open mind and play how you feel and not follow trends. “I try to be myself.”
