Philippe Entremont

Prizes arrived at the Paris Conservatoire before he was sixteen — sight-reading at twelve, chamber music at fourteen, piano at fifteen — and were followed by the Long-Thibaud and, in 1952, a prize at the Queen Elisabeth in Brussels. Eugene Ormandy heard him in 1954 and engaged him; the Philadelphia debut came in November 1956, and an exclusive Columbia contract produced a large discography centred on the French repertoire and the Viennese concertos, much of it issued in Europe by Philips. Conducting took over gradually and then almost entirely: chief conductor of the Vienna Chamber Orchestra from 1976 to 1991 and its conductor laureate since, music director in New Orleans between 1980 and 1986 and in Denver at the end of that decade, conductor laureate of the Israel Chamber Orchestra, and principal guest conductor of the Shanghai Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra from 2002. He directed a good deal of the concerto repertoire from the keyboard. In 1997 he founded the biennial Santo Domingo Music Festival. Born at Reims into a musical family, he studied with Marguerite Long and Jean Doyen, and an early Carnegie Hall programme paired concertos by Jolivet and Liszt; Leonard Bernstein was among the conductors on his records. He has worked with orchestras in the Netherlands as well, and has taught at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau and the Ravel Academy.