The majority of concerts and operas in Paris happen in the city centre and at La VIllette at its North-Eastern edge. But at the opposite end of the city (technically just outside it, in the municipality of Boulogne-Billancourt), a concert hall of awe-inspiring beauty sits on an island in the river: La Seine Musicale. Residents of the western parts of the city – and anyone else who cares to take a ride on métro line 9 – will find a programme to span a wide variety of classical music tastes, curated by the Insula orchestra and its indefatigable founder and musical director Laurence Equilbey.
The 2025–26 season shows Insula’s continued efforts to diversify and try new things, both in their own repertoire and in their invited guests. Still, the core remains the great repertoire works of Beethoven and Bach. The September season opener headlines with the greatest core work of all, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but it’s programmed with two pieces by Bruch that will be considerably less familiar, the overture to his opera Die Loreley and his Concerto for Clarinet and Viola.
On 12th October comes one of Insula’s major invited guest stars: Jan Lisiecki, playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 3 with Thomas Søndergard and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (who also play Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances). His appearance is shortly followed, on 18th and 19th February, by Sunwook Kim playing the Piano Concerto no. 1 to precede that other core work of Beethoven: the Seventh Symphony.
Many Bach fans consider the Mass in B minor to be the greatest choral work of all time, and they will be able to hear it sung in March by the combined forces of Insula, accentus (their associated choir) and the Monteverdi Choir, with a fine set of soloists headed by Núria Real. Equilbey is a superb choral conductor and Insula are specialists at playing on period instruments, so this is the season’s standout event for lovers of choral music.
Johann Sebastian wasn’t the only Bach, or indeed the only Bach who wrote a D major setting of the Magnificat: you can hear the version by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel on 12th–13th December, followed by Mozart’s Coronation Mass, with Insula, accentus, Equilbey and another top class soprano, Sandrine Piau. There’s more Bach choral music, paired with Telemann, on 7th December from invitees Orfeo Orchestra and Purcell Choir.
In March, a Bach concert with a twist is entitled “Dynastie Bach”: it contains music by Carl and his brother, Wilhelm, and their father, as well as Telemann and a newly unearthed piece by none other than Anna Amalia of Prussia, sister of Frederick the Great and patron of Telemann and many others.
Another of France’s current star sopranos, Elsa Benoït, appears in January in the modern romantic region of the choral repertoire, singing the soprano part in three performances of Brahms’ German Requiem (or “Human Requiem”, as the composer described it) in a semi-staged version by David Bobée. We are promised that the setting will be the smoking fuselage of a crashed aircraft (make of that what you will). It follows Bobée and Equilbey’s successful collaboration on Fidelio in 2022.