Emmanuel Pahud

Born in Geneva in 1970, Emmanuel Pahud took his first flute lessons at the age of six. He later studied with Michel Debost at the Paris Conservatoire and with Aurèle Nicolet in Basel. First prizes at the international competitions of Duino (1988), Kobe (1989), and Geneva (1992) brought Pahud to the attention of fellow musicians in his field at an early age. He was appointed principal flutist with the Berlin Philharmonic when he was 22 and remains a member today and has moreover developed his career as an internationally sought-after soloist and chamber musician. Pahud has worked with such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Giovanni Antonini, Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Daniel Harding, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Sir Simon Rattle. He regularly gives recitals with the pianists Eric Le Sage, Alessio Bax, Yefim Bronfman, and Stephen Kovacevich, and together with François
Leleux, Paul Meyer, Gilbert Audin, and Radovan Vlatković he is part of the wind ensemble Les Vents Français. Pahud’s repertoire ranges from Baroque to contemporary music and includes excursions into jazz. Composers such as Elliott Carter, Marc-André Dalbavie, Toshio Hosokawa, Michael Jarrell, Philippe Manoury, and Matthias Pintscher have written new works for him. His discography comprises around 30 releases, for which he has been awarded the Echo Klassik seven times as well as the Victoires de la musique, the Diapason d’or, and Japan’s Record Academy Award. His most recent recording, which was released in the fall of 2018, is of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s flute concertos with the Kammerakademie Potsdam under Trevor Pinnock. Emmanuel Pahud is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 27 August 1989 in Vivaldi’s flute concerto La notte, with the Festival Strings Lucerne under Rudolf Baumgartner; in recent summers, he has been a regular guest here with the Berlin Philharmonic.

August 2019