Maxime Pascal

Conductor Maxime Pascal specializes in contemporary music and audio- and video-enhanced presentations of traditional repertory. He was appointed music director of the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra in Sweden in 2023. Pascal was born in Nantes, France, on September 9, 1985. He grew up mostly in the cities of Carcassonne, Tarbes, and Bayonne. Pascal entered the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSM) in 2005 as a musicologist but felt a need to become a conductor and switched to the conducting class of François-Xavier Roth. While still a student there, he co-founded the ensemble Le Balcon in 2008, taking its name from that of the revolutionary play by Jean Genet. The group has continued to perform, making use of sound systems in the presentation of contemporary music. Pascal took as a sound ideal the all-enveloping sound system of a movie theater. He worked with various composers, including Pierre Boulez, with whom he devised a sound-enhanced version of the orchestral work Le Marteau sans maître in 2011. That year, Pascal traveled to Germany to participate in the International Ensemble Moderne Academy, and he also performed in Austria. During a residence at the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet in Paris in 2013, he conducted a performance of Richard Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos, and the following year, he won the Young Conductors Award at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, becoming the first French conductor to do so. He made his recording debut in 2016 on the Alpha label, leading Le Balcon in a performance of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Pascal returned on the Dynamic label in 2018, leading the Haydn Orchestra di Bolzano e Trento in a recording of the Requiem of Silvia Colasanti. In 2022, he was heard with Le Balcon on a B Records recording of Schoenberg's chamber version of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, and he returned the following year, again with Le Balcon, on Alpha with L'opéra de quat'sous, a recording of a new translation into French of Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper ("The Threepenny Opera").
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