Sylvain Gasançon
Sylvain Gasançon is currently the chief conductor of the OFUNAM in Mexico City, one of the foremost symphony orchestras of Latin America.
Gasançon was awarded first prize in the International Eduardo Mata Conducting Competition in Mexico in 2005. The following year, he won second prize at the International Jorma Panula Conducting Competition in Vaasa, Finland. Since then, he has become an established figure on the international scene. He consistently receives public and critical acclaim for his powerful and musical interpretations of works ranging from Brahms to Berio and from Messiaen to Korngold and Schoenberg.
Recent performance highlights have included debuts with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Portuguese Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra in Colombia, as well as returns to the Teatro Colón Orchestra in Buenos Aires, the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa, and the National Symphony Orchestra and Ballet Nacional in Mexico.
Among many past engagements, he has conducted Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, the Magdeburgische Philharmonie, the St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra, the Vaasa City Orchestra, the National Orchestra of Lorraine, the Orchestre de Bretagne, Sinfonia Rotterdam, the Orquesta Sinfónica de la Región de Murcia and the Sofia Festival Orchestra.
Gasançon enjoys a close relationship with Latin America and has led nearly all of the major orchestras in the region, including the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, the Argentine National Symphony, the Bogotá Philharmonic and the National Symphony Orchestra of Chile. In Mexico, he has conducted the National Symphony Orchestra and the Orquesta del Palacio de Bellas Artes with the Ballet Nacional, as well as the OFUNAM.
He has collaborated with many prominent soloists, including Peter Donohoe, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Lara St. John, Rachel Barton Pine, Simone Lamsma, Leticia Moreno, Leonard Elschenbroich, Nicolas Dautricourt, Benedetto Lupo, Alex Klein, Lucas Macías Navarro, the Catalyst Quartet, Gwyneth Wentink, Nathalie Forget, Wonmi Kim and Fabio Martino.
His first conducting teacher was Jean-Sébastien Béreau. He subsequently received guidance from conductors Gerhard Markson at the Mozarteum Salzburg, Gianluigi Gelmetti at the Fondazione Chigiana in Siena, Jorma Panula and Pinchas Zukerman at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and Jorma Panula in Lausanne and Saint Petersburg. He graduated from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, where he studied harmony, counterpoint, analysis and orchestration.
Gasançon is also an authority on musicology and literature. He obtained a master’s degree in musicology at the Université de Paris and continues to research gender studies and literature at a specialized research institute in Paris. He received the title of Agrégé de Musique.
Born in Metz, France, he began studying music at the age of five. He gave his first violin concerts at a very early age and studied at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Bruxelles with Prof. Endre Kleve.
Gasançon speaks French, Spanish, Italian, English and German.
Bruckner, Symphony Number 4
“…an exhibition of the best that the orchestra could possibly sound: controlled, concentrated and mindfully attentive. The French conductor is in his prime, and one hears the intellectuality in the articulation of his discourse. There is an efficiency of the way in which in just a few rehearsals he achieves just what he needs to configure sound wise detail, while allowing the musicians to easily follow him from behind their stands.”
“The real artistic success of the evening was the Rite of Spring of Gasançon, winner of the
Eduardo Mata Conducting Competition, and whose technical and intelectual capacities have already been admired. …allowing to show his own reading of the score, under his baton the orchestra sounded brilliant, precise, and offered a lively, violent and emotional performance that should have been recorded just like that
”