www.michelbrousseau.com

An accomplished musician, Canadian conductor and pianist Michel Brousseau is the artistic director of the Société philharmonique du Nouveau Monde, which is composed of Montreal’s Orchestre et Chœur philharmonique du Nouveau Monde, the Ottawa Classical Choir, the Chanteurs de Sainte-Thérèse and the Chœur Tremblant. He is also the artistic director of the International Choir, which he founded in 2010.

Michel Brousseau was introduced to music early in life. His passion and talent became clear when he took up intensive piano studies at the age of 9. He completed his studies at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, where he was unanimously awarded first prize in piano. Having also developed a passion for symphonic music, he knew from the age of 14 that he would grow up to be a conductor. He studied orchestral conducting with Maestro Raffi Armenian and with such masters as Otto Werner-Müller, Milen Nachev, Valery Vachev and Aldo Faldi. A finalist in the Luigi Mancinelli Opera Conductors’ International Competition in 2005, he has since been frequently invited to conduct orchestras in Italy, France, the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, the United States and Canada.

A devoted lover of opera, he has also conducted several operas in Europe, the United States and Canada. In February 2013, he conducted the Italian premiere of the opera Pinocchio at the renowned Teatro San Carlo, in Naples.

Another of Maestro Brousseau’s passions is to bring recognition to lesser known works in the classical repertoire. In 2007, he discovered several works by Théodore Dubois (1837-1924), a French composer who was a contemporary of Gabriel Fauré. In June 2010, Maestro Brousseau and the International Choir were invited to perform Dubois’s Messe solennelle de Saint-Rémi at New York’s Carnegie Hall, with the New England Symphonic Ensemble. This event marked the work’s premiere on the American stage. This work, as well as the Messe de la délivrance by the same composer, has since been recorded on the ATMA Classique label. Maestro Brousseau, together with the International Choir, has also performed both works in some of France’s most beautiful cathedrals (in Paris, Reims, Montpellier and Metz), as part of a concert tour in 2011.

As a pianist, Maestro Brousseau has recorded all of Frédéric Chopin’s Polish songs for voice and piano (Op. 74) in collaboration with Ottawa soprano Maria Knapik. These joyful pieces, sadly still too little known, have an important place in the history of Polish song. The recording, entitled Pieśni, was released in fall 2014.