La Seine Musicale launches

La Seine Musicale

New concert halls seem to continue coming thick and fast. Paris's latest hall opens on 22 April 2017, the 1100-seater auditorium which is part of La Seine Musicale, the new concert venue on L'Ile de Seguin. La Seine Musicale will be the new home for Laurence Equilbey's Insula Orchestra (you can read my interview with Laurence on this blog).

Insula Orchestra opens the hall on 22 & 23 April 2017 with a programme of Mozart, Berlioz, Weber and Beethoven with soloists Sandrine Piau, Anaïk Morel, Stanislas de Barbeyrac, Florian Sempey and Bertrand Chamayou. Then comes a production of Haydn's The Creation by La Fura dels Baus on 11 and 12 May, as part of a larger tour starting in Aix-en-Provence on 14 March and touring to Vienna on 15 and 16 May, Ludwigsburg and Hamburg in June 2017. Visitors to the hall include the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conductor Thomas Sondergard, in a programme of Britten, Shostakovich and Sibelius on 19 May 2017.

Commissioned by the Departement des Hauts-de-Seine and designed by architects Shigeru Ban and Jean de Gastines, La Seine Musicale appears to float on the River Seine to the south west of the capital at Boulogne-Billancourt. The multi-purpose music venue includes two concert halls, restaurants and retail spaces, and it is intended to be at the heart of the cultural revitalisation of the area.