Emmanuel Pahud

Appointed principal flute of the Berliner Philharmoniker on 1 September 1993, at twenty-two, Emmanuel Pahud has held the chair since, apart from an interval during which he taught at the Geneva Conservatoire. He was born in Geneva in 1970, began the flute at six in Rome, and trained in Brussels, in Paris with Michel Debost and in Basel with Aurèle Nicolet, taking first prizes at Duino in 1988, Kobe in 1989 and Geneva in 1992. The solo career has run in parallel with the orchestral chair: the Baroque and Classical concertos, the French repertoire, transcriptions, jazz collaborations, and concertos written for him by Marc-André Dalbavie, Elliott Carter and Jörg Widmann, several of which he has introduced with his own orchestra. He is a founding member of Les Vents Français and records extensively. The Léonie Sonning Music Prize came to him in 2024. He took the Premier Prix at the Paris Conservatoire in 1990 and played principal flute in the Basel Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1989 to 1992 and then in the Munich Philharmonic, and at the Geneva competition in 1992 eight of the twelve special prizes went to him. In 1993 he founded the international chamber music festival at Salon-de-Provence with Éric Le Sage and Paul Meyer, and from 1996 he recorded exclusively for EMI and later Warner Classics; he has been honorary president of the French national flute association since 2017.