Lunch-Concert : Jamie Man / Mahler

In partnership with Orchestre de Chambre de Paris, Théâtre du Châtelet is running a new series of concerts this season comprising a morning session reserved for schoolchildren and a lunchtime session for all ages. The format for both sessions is the same: a contemporary work or a ten-minute devised piece, followed by a discussion with the composer or a musician. Then, building on the insights gleaned from the discussion, the work is performed a second time and interacts with a major work of classical music.

Born in London, of Chinese origin, Jamie Man has followed an atypical yet coherent career path over the past ten years. At the age of twenty-three, she won the Pears-Britten scholarship for conducting, which took her from Holland Festival to La Monnaie Opera of Brussels. At the same time, she has continued to work as a composer, and has performed her works in major European venues, from the Gulbenkian Foundation to the Royal Opera House. For this concert at Châtelet, she combines her two passions with an original work devised by her… but played without a conductor. Her conducting skills are however on full display with Mahler‘s Blumine, a symphony with a strange back-story in that it was excluded by Mahler himself from his Symphony No. 1, and was assumed destroyed and lost, until 1967 when these “Flowers” were found and performed in public under the baton of Benjamin Britten… Even after seventy years of absence, it’s never too late to blossom!