ONJ Youth Orchestra #4

Residency in the Hauts-de-France region, France

After François Jeanneau, Franck Tortiller, and Denis Badault, it was pianist and composer Laurent Cugny’s turn to conduct the Orchestre des Jeunes for its fourth season. This time, the Orchestra comprised 14 new young French and European musicians, and for the first time, it was also open to students from the Music, Sound, and Image Department of the CNSM in Paris, welcoming a sound engineer in training.

Between January and July 2023, the Orchestra set up camp in the Hauts-de-France region, stopping off at the Lille and Dunkirk Conservatories, Maison de la Culture in Amiens – Label Bleu’s Gil Evans Studio – and the Saint-Omer Conservatory for a concert as part of the Saint-Omer Jazz Festival. In Paris, it performed at the Jussieu campus auditorium of Sorbonne University, not to mention the invaluable contribution of its soloists to the public restitution of the second edition of the Composition Academy.

This unprecedented collective adventure delved into Laurent Cugny’s repertoire created for the ONJ between 1994 and 1997, encompassing in equal parts original pieces and arrangements of compositions by Miles Davis, John Scofield, Wynton Marsalis, David Crosby, and John McLaughlin.