Stability through diversity: Is Orchestre Ostinato’s artistic direction collective the future of orchestra management?

Announcing the appointment of five new artistic directors earlier this year, Paris-based training orchestra Orchestre Ostinato wrote that the organisation is ‘seeing its artistic direction evolve and has therefore opted for a collective approach.’ The new ‘collective’ of artistic directors combines the influences of pianist and conductor Jean-François Heisser and conductors Chloé Dufresne and Julien Leroy with cellist Anne Gastinel and violinist Pierre Fouchenneret. With this broad range of input, the group is intended to breathe new life into the training orchestra’s activities with ‘the diversity of its members designed to encourage a variety of repertoires and projects to best prepare young musicians for their future careers.’

Heisser, Dufresne, Leroy, Gastinel and Fouchenneret took on the orchestra’s leadership last month, and they are already bringing a valuable blend of experience and expertise to their collective role. So far, the groups’ five members have meshed well, Dufresne says: ‘Our profiles as conductors or soloists, our cross-generational backgrounds and our diverse career paths are very complementary.’ Within the group’s broader cohesion, members are also forming their own enclaves to cover specific areas. Fouchenneret, for example, is pairing up with Gastinel to focus on developing the orchestra’s performance-led training offering. While Heisser confirms that ‘each of us, with our own specificities, can think about a strategy for repertoire, recruitment, type of project, teaching, etc.’, he maintains that these breakaway groups do not detract from the collective’s ‘high-level vision’. Leroy also is quick to point out that, while the collective structure allows different group members to exercise their own strengths, ‘What's important in this project is the Orchestra much more than its management. The advantage of having several members is that we can each bring our own experience and specialities to the service of young people.’

From left to right: Jean-François Heisser, Chloé Dufresne, Julien Leroy, Anne Gastinel and Pierre Fouchenneret

General director Emmanuelle Duthu, who was in favour of the collective management idea from the start, is keen, through the group’s cohesion and variety, to offer a sustainable future for the orchestra and its students. ‘When I joined the orchestra 5 years ago, I realised how valuable it could be to have different conductors and different supervisors from some of the biggest orchestras. It seemed to me that forming an artistic collective would bring these multiple points of view to the project, with a vision built up by several people, over time and in the longer term.’ Duthu is already seeing the benefit of bringing together five different perspectives and skill sets: ‘Basically, they bring diversity to the stability that we have less of when we have an artistic director with guest conductors.’

Founded in 1997 by composer and conductor Manuel Rosenthal and originally named the Orchestre-atelier Ostinato, the Orchestre Ostinato offers two years of paid training to 80 instrumentalists aged between 18 and 25 aiming to develop their career as an orchestral musician. The orchestra presents 20 to 30 concerts each year, bringing its musicians to venues across France including the Philharmonie de Paris, the Théâtre de l'Athénée and the Théâtre du Châtelet.

Although the collective model is designed to bring stability to Orchestre Ostinato, anyone who is part of a group chat will know that managing day-to-day work and decision-making among multiple people can be a balancing act. Leroy acknowledges that a music career doesn’t always offer a lot of time for communication and decision-making, but he’s not deterred: ‘We're all very busy with busy individual careers, but we know each other well and important decisions can be taken easily by mutual agreement.’ Duthu kept in mind the high level of collaboration needed when assembling the group earlier this year. ‘For a collective to work, everyone has to know and like each other. The first person I contacted was Julien Leroy, I knew who his close friends were, and I let them put their group together. The specifications called for people recognised for their artistic qualities and backgrounds, conductors and soloists with different levels of experience.’

Communication is especially important in this early stage of the collective’s tenure, and members are keenly aware of the need to prioritise the collective in the short term, to ensure the longer term success Duthu is after. ‘We try to meet regularly,’ says Dufresne, ‘which is particularly important in this start-up period.’ Within the collective’s wider ‘strategic approach’, Fouchenneret is also aware of the need to be flexible, ‘we're in an observation phase and we're going to adjust some of our ambitions to the reality of the orchestra.’

While collaboration within the collective is paramount, collaboration with external organisations is also essential for orchestra members’ professional growth. Developing musicians within the Orchestre Ostinato benefit from artistic partnerships with organisations including the Académie de l'Opéra national de Paris as well as upcoming partnerships with prisons in the Île-de-France region. For the students, having five artistic directors means access to five area of expertise, five sets of familiar repertoire and five sets of professional contacts. Heisser puts the music first: ‘The important thing is that young people should tackle all types of repertoires, from early music to the discovery of young composers, and all musical forms, symphonic, concertante, opera, chamber music and contemporary music. They can adapt to different venues, amplified music and so on. We all have rich backgrounds and many contacts. Our added value also comes from activating our distribution networks.’

The new artistic directors’ collective certainly encompasses a range of networks, and each member has something different to offer. Already a patron of Orchestre Ostinato, Heisser brings to the group his experience, not only as a pianist and conductor, but also as musical director of the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Aquitaine and founder of the Ravel Festival. A prize winner at both the 2021 Malko and Besançon Conducting Competitions, Dufresne is currently assistant to Gustavo Dudamel at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra where she holds the Dudamel Fellowship. Leroy is currently principal conductor of the United Instruments of Lucilin and assistant conductor of the Ensemble Intercontemporain while cellist Gastinel balances her career as an international soloist with her professorship at Lyon’s Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse. Fouchenneret combines his violin performance with a vibrant parallel career as a composer.

This variety seems to fit Duthu’s vision for the group to a tee, and if the current (almost utopian) level of communication and cohesion continues, this new structure could not only offer sustainability for the orchestra going forward, but enhanced support for its students too. This, says Dufresne, is the group’s main mission: ‘The only thing that's stable is them, their musical environment is changing, and we teach them to take responsibility for themselves’. With friendship and respect an integral part of making the collective model work at orchestra Ostinato, the collective is keen to extend this to the students they manage too. ‘We support them, of course,’ adds Gastinel, ‘but we trust them.’