Raphaël Pichon

Biography

Born in 1984, Raphaël Pichon began his musical training in violin, piano, and voice at various conservatories in Paris (CNSMDP and CRR). As a young professional singer, he appeared under the direction of such personalities as Jordi Savall, Gustav Leonhardt, and Ton Koopman, and as a member of Les Cris de Paris under Geoffroy Jourdain, with whom he explored contemporary music.
In 2006, he founded Pygmalion, a choir and period-instrument orchestra that quickly attracted attention for the originality of its projects. The music of J.S. Bach, the late versions of Rameau’s great tragédies lyriques, programmes placing Mozart rarities in perspective, and a traversal of Romantic repertoire are among the projects that form the basis of Pygmalion’s identity. Through work centred on the fusion between choir and orchestra and a dramaturgical approach to concert performance, Pygmalion’s diverse productions swiftly gained praise both in France and internationally. Together with his ensemble, Raphaël Pichon has performed at the Philharmonie de Paris, the Château de Versailles, the BBC Proms, Bozar Brussels, the Konzerthaus in Vienna, the Cologne Philharmonie, the Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona, the French May Arts Fest in Hong Kong, and the Beijing Music Festival.
In the opera house, Pichon has conducted productions at the Opéra-Comique, the Aix-en-Provence Festival, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, and the Opéra National de Bordeaux, while collaborating with stage directors including Katie Mitchell, Romeo Castellucci, Simon McBurney, Michel Fau, Pierre Audi, Jeanne Candel, Jochen Sandig, Cyril Teste, Aurélien Bory, Satoshi Miyagi, Laurent Pelly, and Jetske Mijnssen.
In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Pichon launched “Pulsations” in Bordeaux, a versatile and eclectic festival that engages local actors and presents exceptional concerts in unexpected venues throughout the city and metropolitan area.
Among the most significant projects of recent years have been his debut at the Aix-en-Provence Festival with the creation of Trauernacht on music by J.S. Bach, the rediscovery of Luigi Rossi’s Orfeo (2016), the spatialisation of Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine, a series of artistic encounters around Bach cantatas at the Philharmonie de Paris, along with that composer’s complete motets and the Mass in B Minor, and staged performances of Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem at the immense submarine base in Bordeaux.
He made his debut at the Salzburg Festival in 2018 with the Mozarteum Orchestra, at the Berlin Philharmonie with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, and has since guest-conducted the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, the Orchestra La Scintilla of the Zurich Opera, MusicAeterna founded by Teodor Currentzis, and the Violons du Roy in Quebec, as well as the Freiburger Barockorchester and the SWR Symphonieorchester alongside Isabelle Faust. In 2021, he made his Boston debut with the Handel and Haydn Society Orchestra, returning there in 2022 for Le nozze di Figaro. In 2023, he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the same opera at the Salzburg Festival.
His numerous recordings on the harmonia mundi label regularly garner critical acclaim and include Enfers with Stéphane Degout (2018); Libertà!, featuring lesser-known Mozart masterpieces (2019); the Bach Motets (2020) and Saint Matthew Passion (2022); Mein Traum, partnering once more with Stéphane Degout in music by Schubert, Schumann, and Weber (2022); Monteverdi’s Vespro della Beata Vergine (2023); Mozart’s Requiem (2024); and, most recently, Bach’s Mass in B Minor (March 2025).
Raphaël Pichon holds the rank of Officier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.