French conductor LIONEL BRINGUIER is Chief Conductor designate and Music Director of the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich for the 2014/15 season and is in his sixth and final year as Resident Conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the 2012/13 season. He also makes debut appearances this season with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as the National Orchestra of Spain in Madrid. Additional conducting highlights include return engagements with the New York Philharmonic, the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, among many others.

Lionel Bringuier’s collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, an institution and artistic team to which he has shown deep affinity his entire career, began at the invitation of then Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen and continues under the current Music Director, Gustavo Dudamel. During his final season in this position, he conducts subscription performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall, concerts at the famed Hollywood Bowl and in the Green Umbrella contemporary music series, in addition to working with important guest conductors and the Music Director.

In the world of opera, Lionel Bringuier made a sensation in 2011 with Carmen in Valladolid (Magdalena Kožená) and in Stockholm (Katarina Dalayman) at the Royal Swedish Opera. Future plans include Werther at Teatro alla Scala, Milan.

Bringuier was the winner of the 49th Besançon Young Conductors Competition in 2005 (the unanimous choice of the jury) and the “Prix du Public” as the audience favorite, as well as the top vote of the musicians of the Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse. Since these triumphs, he has conducted with and been invited to return to some of the leading orchestras in the world, including the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Munich Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, and the Cleveland Orchestra. Bringuier served as Music Director of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León in Valladolid, Spain, from 2009-2012.

Born in Nice, France in 1986, Bringuier attended the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris from the age of 13, beginning his conducting studies in 2000 with Zsolt Nagy. He also participated in masterclasses with Peter Eötvös and Janos Fürst. In June 2004, he obtained his diploma in cello and conducting with “Mention Très Bien à l’unanimité.” Other distinctions include the “Médaille d’or à l’unanimité avec les felicitations du jury à l’Académie Prince Rainier III de Monaco,” the “Médaille d’or” from the Lord Mayor of Nice, as well as first prize in a competition organized by the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra in Ostrava. Bringuier has also received prizes from the Swiss Foundation Langart and the Cziffra Foundation.

Selected Reviews

“Bringuier fluidly steered the orchestra through a clear, measured reading of a score that works through its jubilant opening and wafting of solemnity in the second movement, before the famed finale's irrational, even dizzily orgiastic exuberance.”
Josef Woodard, LA Times, 4th August 2012

“Bringuier also had the Philharmonic responding alertly in Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” – full of rambunctious energy and mischief, dancing with life whenever emerging from a contemplative variation, centered by a straight-forward, flowing Nimrod variation that drew applause in mid-piece…Bringuier and Bronfman kept the midsummer Bowl doldrums away for at least a day.”
Richard S. Ginell, LA Times 1st August 2012

“It is rare for music to stay in my ears for long afterwards because I listen to so much of it. This is a tribute, therefore to the orchestra and the conductor Lionel Bringuier!”
Rolf-Bernhard Essig, Fränkischer Tag, 12th March 2012

“a character who is capable of having a vision and deciding to realise it. It is rare among those in musical life to find individuals who are, to use the language of Albarn Berg, prepared to consider music of their time as ‘classical’ and ‘classical’ music belonging to our time.”
Pierre Boulez quotation in “Tomorrow’s Icons: 10 new conductors on the verge of greatness” story, Gramophone, June 2011

“Lionel Bringuier had totally convinced and furthermore – this is essential – he had profoundly moved us.”
Renaud Machard, Le Monde, 12th April 2011

“a natural talent whose good instincts are bolstered by good taste plus a strong technique”
Martin Bernheimer, Financial Times, 9th August 2010

“Bringuier played with colors, created sharp contrasts, conducted with tremendous -- and convincing -- propulsion….Bringuier saved the day.”
Mark Swed, LA Times, 7th May 2010

“Under the lithe baton of the precocious Lionel Bringuier (still just 22, but an authoritative presence) we heard a bitingly realised Dance of the Seven Veils from Strauss’s opera before the orchestral suite from Schmitt’s 1907 ballet. And this, too, was suffused with pungent detail - the glowering bassoon looking ahead to Stravinsky’s Rite, the sinuous woodwind recalling his Firebird”
Neil Fisher, The Times, 3rd March 2009

Related Links:

Lionel Bringuier Website

Videos:

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  Lionel Bringuier on the Los Angeles Philharmonic

  Lionel Bringuier on the Los Angeles Philharmonic

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  Lionel Bringuier on What a Resident Conductor Does

  Lionel Bringuier on What a Resident Conductor Does