Eric Montalbetti

Éric Montalbetti was born in 1968 to parents who greatly appreciated music. He began learning piano and organ, and at the age of eleven, he intuitively started composing, an activity he would keep private for many years. Alongside his high-school studies, he regularly came to IRCAM and the Collège de France to attend lectures by Pierre Boulez, Andrew Gerzso, and Robert Piencikowski. At the Conservatoire de Paris, he audited courses with Paul Méfano, Michaël Levinas, and Alain Bancquart. He later deepened his training with Magnus Lindberg, George Benjamin, Philippe Manoury, and Tristan Murail at the Centre Acanthes.

From 1996 to 2014, he served as Artistic Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. He left the position in 2015 to focus fully on composition and to share works that had previously remained private, written, as he describes them, “like pages from an intimate diary.”

His catalog includes works for orchestra, chamber ensemble, and solo instruments, as well as vocal music. Inhabited by a strong sense of spirituality, Montalbetti seeks to express the sacred through his music, as in Vaste champ temporel à vivre joyeusement (1997-2015), Ave Maria (2008), and Inviolata (2008). He also draws inspiration from the visual arts, particularly sculpture, as in Memento Emmanuaile (2019) in homage to the sculptor Antoine Poncet, and painting, as found in Fenêtres simultanées sur la ville (2018) after Sonia and Robert Delaunay’s work, Trois études après Kandinsky (1990), and Hommage à Matisse (2018). Literature and poetry also play an important role in his work, as in Cavernes & Soleils (2021), based on poems by Andrée Chedid.

Montalbetti’s musical language brings together elements of serialism with a renewed form of modality, built on constructed harmonic scales — an approach that continues in the lineage of Olivier Messiaen.

Montalbetti has received commissions from renowned orchestras such as the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and the Tokyo Sinfonietta, as well as from institutions and festivals including Radio France, Spannungen, Les Musicales de Colmar, Le Volcan du Havre, and the Printemps des Arts de Monte-Carlo.

His music has been performed by soloists and ensembles such as Christian Tetzlaff, Truls Mørk, Marc Coppey, Fanny Vicens, François-Frédéric Guy, Beatrice Rana, Momo Kodama, Emmanuel Pahud, Pierre Génisson, the Quatuor Mona, Les Dissonances, the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, the Lemanic Modern Ensemble, the Odense Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège, and the Orchestre National de Lyon. Premieres of his works have been conducted by Pierre Bleuse, Renaud Capuçon, Matthias Pintscher, Jonathan Nott, and Mikko Franck, among others.

Montalbetti’s music has been performed in France and internationally, notably in Korea, Japan, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

His works are published by Éditions Durand and Allegretto.

He lives and works in Paris.

Awards and distinctions

• Composer-in-residence at the Spannungen Festival, 2019
• Recipient of awards from the Sacem Foundation and the Yehudi Menuhin Foundation for Sonate pour violon seul, 1990