Top Albums of 2024 / Renaud Loranger, Festival de Lanaudière

To kick off 2025, PAN M 360 asked several of its partners’ artistic directors to suggest their 3 favorite albums of the past year.

Artistic Director of the Festival de Lanaudière, Renaud Loranger is also Vice-President of Artists and Repertoire for the huge European label Pentatone. Since 2016, he has steered the deployment of new internationally renowned artists and led highly creative projects, in addition to nurturing the label’s already extensive repertoire. Prior to this, he was an executive producer in the Artists and Repertoire division of the celebrated Deutsche Grammophon label, from 2011 to 2016. At the end of 2018, Renaud Loranger became Artistic Director of the Festival de Lanaudière, in the town where he grew up, Joliette. Simultaneously taking on a second colossal task, he wasted no time in revitalizing the Festival de Lanaudière artistically and keeping it at the pinnacle of classical festivals in Canada/Quebec. A musicologist, art historian, and man of letters, Renaud Loranger ticks all the boxes of an open-minded, enlightened, and rigorous artistic director, respectful of the legacy of periods prior to our own, and certainly of international calibre.

“I’m going to be very chauvinistic this year, but these three albums are among the ones I’m perhaps most proud of in my career”

A summit meeting between two legendary artists, Kožená and Minkowski, who had not met again on record for almost twenty years, surrounded by a first-class vocal cast and supported by a gleaming orchestra. Kožená, in her first Alcina, is simply stunning. The new reference version of the work.

You don’t expect Aimard to play Schubert, and he surprises you with every phrase, every inflection, in each of these precious miniatures that are too little known and too rarely played. Too easy for students and too difficult for pianists, as Arthur Schnabel said of Mozart – and the same applies here. The research into sound and color is astonishing. A superb recording.

One of the world’s most acclaimed phalanges, in its repertoire of choice – what more could you ask for? The Czech Philharmonic is custodian of one of Europe’s richest musical traditions (and not strictly speaking “national”: it was for them that Mahler wrote his Seventh Symphony), and their musical director Semyon Bychkov pulls out all the stops.