Music Director: Le Balcon
Chief Conductor of Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra (from 2024/2025)
Maxime Pascal is a passionate advocate for French, twentieth century and new music, and makes it one of the foundations of his musical collaborations. In his operatic work, this has led him to creating Salvatore Sciarrino’s Te vedo, ti sento, mi perdo at La Scala in 2017, which he later took to Staatsoper Berlin. In 2019 he performed Luca Francesconi’s Quartett with Teatro alla Scala, his third collaboration with the opera house. In the summer of 2023, he made his debut at Festival d’Aix-en-Provence with Le Balcon, performing the highly anticipated production of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Other operatic highlights of recent seasons include appearances at Vienna Festival with Lulu by Alban Berg as well as Bohuslav Martinů’s The Greek Passion at Salzburg Festival. He continues to present a new production of Sonntag aus Licht with Le Balcon in 2023 in Philharmonie de Paris.
Maxime also explores his French heritage in his opera work, collaborating with Opéra de Paris on multiple occasions to perform works such as Daphnis et Chloé, Boléro, L’heure espagnole and Gianni Schicchi. In Europe, he conducted Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at Malmö Opera in 2016 and made his hugely successful BBC Proms debut in 2019 in Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ with the Hallé, Britten Sinfonia Voices and Genesis Sixteen. In the same season, Maxime conducted a Debussy/Stravinsky programme with the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra in Caracas. In recent seasons he conducted Peter Eötvös’s new opera Sleepless in Berlin and Geneva, and premiered Sivan Eldar’s Like Flesh in Lille.
