Pierre Dumoussaud

Conductor Pierre Dumoussaud is an opera conductor who was appearing at top Parisian houses by the early 2020s. He specializes in 19th and early 20th century French opera. Dumoussaud was born in France in 1990. His first ambition was to become a bassoonist, but he switched to conducting and studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, concluding his time there in 2014; his teachers were Alain Altinoglu and Nicolas Brochot. He also took master classes or had guidance from David Zinman, Susanna Mälkki, Frieder Bernius, and other conductors. He won the Talents Chefs d'Orchestre award from the French performing artists' organization ADAMI in 2014, and in 2015, he scored a breakthrough when he substituted for Alain Lombard at the last minute, leading the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine at a televised concert. He was already serving as that company's assistant conductor. Dumoussaud won another major award in 2017 when he took the top prize at the Opéra Royal de Wallonie's Concours International de Chefs d’Orchestre d’Opéra in Belgium. That led to a series of increasingly high-profile conducting engagements with both opera companies and orchestral ensembles. The former group included the Opéra de Lille, where he led the world premiere of La Princesse lumière, an opera by Violeta Cruz, the Opéra de Rouen, and the Bayerische Staatsoper in Germany. In the orchestral realm, Dumoussaud has appeared with such groups as the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, the Kanazawa Ensemble Orchestra, and the Real Filharmonía de Galicia. He also co-directed the Ives Symphony No. 4 with Peter Eötvös, another mentor, at the Lucerne Festival. By 2021, Dumoussaud was leading performances at Paris houses; he conducted Offenbach's La belle Hélène at the Opéra Comique, and the production Hommage à Roland Petit at the Opéra National de Paris. That year, Dumoussaud conducted a production of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande with the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, recorded and released on the Alpha label.
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