Bonne chance maestro Järvi!

Paavo Järvi is a very good conductor who these days officially became the new music director of Orchestre de Paris. The inaugural concert at Pleyel will take place tonight [Wednesday, Sept. 15 @ 8 p.m. (CET)]. I have a ticket and I'll go but you (all of you!) can come with me too --if you want-- thanks to Arte Live Web. You can either follow this link or see the concert tonight in a video embedded below [at the end of this entry].

The program is available here.
Järvi evidently opted to present himself with a Nordic sound of Jean Sibelius [close to his native Estonia], and combine it with a fitting French sound which appears to be La Péri by Paul Dukas.
Two Finnish soloists will be singing: Soile Isokoski and our fave Juha Uusitalo.

Paavo Järvi

Orchestre de Paris is a strange bunch: they are like a treasury of top class musicians, but together they rarely perform at the level you'd expect them to. Last time I listened them reaching the level of any Top-10 world orchestra was at Pleyel, in a performance of the Britten's War Requiem, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher. That was a good illustration that they could be great and that a chemistry between them and their previous director, Christoph Eschenbach was lacking. Let's hope Järvi will be able to make the best of the orchestra's potential and help them regain the Top-10 level they deserve. 
Good luck maestro!

Paavo Järvi was the music director of Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra with whom he recently released a very good recording of Mahler's Symphony #2. Here is a 15min long promotional video:




Curiously Järvi did not start as a pianist or violinist, but rather as a percussionist. Cool!

Below is the video-link which will become active tonight at 20:00 (cet).
See you at Pleyel then :)