Mozart : Beauté sublime ! Charles Richard-Hamelin et Jonathan Cohen

Jonathan Cohen has forged a remarkable career as a conductor, cellist, and keyboardist. Well known for his passion and commitment to chamber music, Jonathan is equally at home in such diverse areas as Baroque opera and the Classical symphonic repertoire. He is Artistic Director of Arcangelo, Music Director of Les Violons du Roy, Artistic Director of the Tetbury Music Festival, and Artistic Partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

The 2021–22 season sees Jonathan direct a number of baroque masterpieces, including Messiah with Rotterdam Philharmonic and Les Violons du Roy and St. Matthew Passion with Arcangelo (BBC Proms) and the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. He returns to the Glyndebourne Festival Opera for Alcina and to the Budapest Festival Orchestra for a programme of Scarlatti, Vivaldi and Handel. In the USA, he is back for concerts at the helm of the Handel and Haydn Society and Philharmonia Baroque.

In 2010 Jonathan founded Arcangelo, an ensemble that strives to present special musical projects of the highest quality. He has toured with the group to exceptional halls and festivals, including Wigmore Hall in London, Philharmonie Berlin, Kölner Philharmonie, Vienna Musikverein, the Salzburg Festival, and Carnegie Hall in New York. Arcangelo made its Proms debut at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2016 and returned to the Proms in 2018 to present Theodora to a sold-out Royal Albert Hall.

Arcangelo is busy and much in demand in the recording studio, partnering with fine soloists such as Iestyn Davies (its disc Arias for Guadagni won the Recital Category at the 2012 Gramophone Awards and its recording of Bach cantatas was best Baroque Vocal recording at the 2017 Gramophone Awards), Anna Prohaska, and Christopher Purves for Hyperion Records. Arcangelo’s Mozart disc with Vilde Frang on Warner Classics reached No. 1 on the UK specialist Classical chart and received an Echo Klassik Concert Award. Recital recordings with both Christiane Karg and Matthew Rose were nominated for International Opera Awards in 2016. Its recording CPE Bach Cello Concertos with Nicolas Altstaedt won the BBC Music Magazine Awards Concerto category in 2017, and its Buxtehude Trio Sonatas, Op.1 recording for Alpha Classics was nominated for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance at the 2018 Grammy Awards. Arcangelo’s most recent recordings of Magnificats by members of the Bach family and Charpentier’s Leçons de ténèbres are already attracting critical acclaim. Their latest release for Alpha Classics is Handel’s Brockes Passion.

Silver medalist and laureate of the Krystian Zimerman Prize at the 2015 International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw, Canadian pianist Charles Richard-Hamelin is standing out today as one of the most important musicians of his generation. In 2014, he also won the second prize at the Montreal International Musical Competition and the third prize at the Seoul International Music Competition in South Korea. Charles is the recipient of the Order of Arts and Letters of Quebec and the prestigious Career Development Award offered by the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto.

He has appeared in various prestigious festivals including La Roque d’Anthéron in France, the Prague Spring Festival, the “Chopin and his Europe” Festival in Warsaw and the Lanaudière Festival in Canada. As a soloist, he has performed with more than fifty ensembles including the main symphony orchestras of Canada (Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Métropolitain, Québec, Edmonton, Calgary…) as well as with the Warsaw Philharmonic, Sinfonia Varsovia, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, the Korean Symphony Orchestra, OFUNAM (Mexico), les Violons du Roy and I Musici de Montréal. He has played under the baton of renowned conductors such as Kent Nagano, Antoni Wit, Vasily Petrenko, Jacek Kaspszyk, Aziz Shokhakimov, Peter Oundjian, Jacques Lacombe, Fabien Gabel, Carlo Rizzi, Alexander Prior, Giancarlo Guerrero, Christoph Campestrini, Lan Shui and Jean-Marie Zeitouni. Charles Richard-Hamelin is a graduate from McGill University, the Yale School of Music, the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal and has studied with Paul Surdulescu, Sara Laimon, Boris Berman, André Laplante et Jean Saulnier.

His first solo recording, which features late works by Chopin, was released in September 2015 on the Analekta label and received widespread acclaim from critics throughout the world (Diapason, BBC Music Magazine, Le Devoir) as well as a Felix Award (ADISQ). A second album, recorded live at the Palais Montcalm in Quebec City with music by Beethoven, Enescu and Chopin, was released in the fall of 2016 and also had a very positive welcome (Gramophone, La Presse, The WholeNote). The first volume of the complete Beethoven violin sonatas with Andrew Wan was released in the fall of 2018 and his next projects include both Chopin Concertos with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Maestro Kent Nagano.