Valentine Michaud & Gabriel Michaud
Biography Valentine Michaud & Gabriel Michaud
Valentine Michaud
Winner of the 2020 Credit Suisse Young Artist Award, Valentine Michaud perfectly combines musical finesse and impeccable technique with an extraordinary artistic vision. Her drive to push boundaries and explore new horizons has established Valentine her unique place in the ever-evolving world of classical music.
The first saxophonist to appear as soloist with the Wiener Philharmoniker, she made her debut under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Lucerne Festival in 2022, performing the saxophone premiere of Anders Hillborg’s Peacock Tales. Recently, she has been guest soloist with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the United States Navy Band, the Sinfonia Varsovia and the Phiharmonie Zuidnederlands, with whom she recorded the Peacock Tales for Outhere Music. She will perform in September 2024 with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Daniel Harding.
Convinced of the richness of collaborations with other art forms and seeking to develop new concert formats, Valentine is one of the founding members of SIBJA, a collective of artists in which she is artistic director with her brother Emmanuel Michaud, performs as an instrumentalist and designs the costumes. SIBJA creates performances merging painters, dancers, musicians and live electronic music in a variety of unique settings, such as the Waiting for Amon trilogy (Nico Kaufman Prize 2018) and short film Le Dialogue de l'Ombre Double.
Keen to expand the expressive range of the saxophone, Valentine has commissioned a number of works with pianist Akvilé Sileikaité, a partner in her Akmi duo with whom she performs all over the world (KKL Luzern, Wigmore Hall, la Cappella St Petersbourg, Wiener Musikverein) and produced the disc "Beyond the Wall" in 2023 (Avie Records). Since 2022, she has been performing as a duo with her brother Gabriel Michaud on percussion. They are recording their first album, Oiseaux de Paradis, to be released by Mirare in 2024. This season they will also make their debut as a duo at the Folle Journée in Tokyo and Warsaw.
Born in Paris in 1993, Valentine Michaud studied saxophone and piano in Nantes before moving to Switzerland at the age of 16, where in 2013 she obtained a bachelor's degree in saxophone from the Haute École de Musique de Lausanne in Pierre-Stéphane Meugé's class, alongside a bachelor's degree in musicology from the Sorbonne University in Paris. After a first master's degree in instrumental pedagogy, she continued her training with a second master's degree as a soloist at the Zürcher Hochschule der Kunste under Professor Lars Mlekusch. Valentine currently teaches at the Conservatoire populaire de musique de Genève.
Kurt Rosenwinkel
American composer, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, and producer Kurt Rosenwinkel is one of the most celebrated musical voices in jazz and is widely renowned as one of the most distinctive and gifted guitarists to have ever played the instrument.
Rosenwinkel’s harmonically rich, rhythmically free, and incomparably fluid style has made him one of the most important jazz musicians to emerge in the last thirty years, and his groundbreaking sonic conception of the guitar has changed the way the instrument has been perceived and played ever since. His recordings as a bandleader in early aughts on Verve Records were strikingly original releases that reshaped contemporary jazz in the 21st century. The Enemies of Energy (2000), The Next Step (2001), Heartcore (2003) and Deep Song (2005), would redefine the sound of jazz for a new era, deftly fusing jazz’s deep acoustic traditions with electronics, digital manipulation, programmed beats, and utterly modern harmonic and compositional structures that even today we can still only reference as ‘Rosenwinkelian’.
He continues this freethinking experimentalism with albums like Our Secret World (2010), in collaboration with the Orchestra de Jazz Matosinhos, the “contemporary classic” (Kelman, All About Jazz) Star of Jupiter (2012), and Caipi (2017), a Brazilian influenced album with Rosenwinkel taking on most of the instrumental and vocal duties.
He continues to reinvent jazz standards on Reflections (2008) and Angels Around (2020). Rosenwinkel’s most recent releases include Kurt Rosenwinkel Plays Piano (2021), an album of solo piano pieces that offers an intimate look at Rosenwinkel’s relationship to the piano and how it formed his compositional mind, and a collaboration with pianist Jean-Paul Brodbeck entitled The Chopin Project (2022) which finds him reimagining Chopin compositions with Brodbeck in a jazz context. His latest upcoming album, Berlin Baritone is a solo improvisational album on baritone guitar, and a uniquely intimate release, where listeners get to hear Rosenwinkel discover the timbral world of his newfound instrument with reverence and curiosity. Rosenwinkel’s prolific output has always retained his unique voice, and each release is a constellation in his singular musical universe, always expanding outwards, to reach for the next beautiful sound.
In addition to his genre-defining work as a bandleader, Rosenwinkel is also an accomplished sideman, with over 150 credits to his name. His first exposure to international touring was with Gary Burton, the legendary vibraphonist who hired him out of Berklee College in 1992. That same year he joined Paul Motian’s Electric Bebop Band, and entered into a decade-long musical relationship with the drummer that helped usher in a new era in Motian’s already illustrious career.
These collaborative relationships, along with tours as Joe Henderson’s guitarist in 1997 established Rosenwinkel early in his career as a player who had the blessing of giants of the jazz world. His work with Brian Blade Fellowship, Mark Turner, Joshua Redman, Seamus Blake, Donald Fagen, and hosts of other jazz luminaries further cemented his star power.
Rosenwinkel’s success has also extended far beyond the world of jazz. He has been a member of the Crossroads Guitar Festival family since 2013, when he was personally invited by blues and rock legend Eric Clapton to perform and share the stage with him. The iconic guitarist who called Rosenwinkel “a genius” also featured on Rosenwinkel’s Caipi (2017), playing on the song “Little Dream”. Rosenwinkel’s collaboration with Q-Tip on The Renaissance (2008) and Kamaal the Abstract (2009) showed that Rosenwinkel’s playing had breadth that extended comfortably into hip-hop that has led to performances on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon with The Roots, and a collaboration with internet sensations DOMi and JD BECK.
In the winter of 2016, Rosenwinkel formed the independent music label Heartcore Records with the focused intention of signing and promoting a new generation of musicians whose exacting standards and creative passions equal his own. Over the last few years Heartcore has released a series of online masterclasses taught by Rosenwinkel that leads viewers through deep theoretical, compositional, and technical explorations of musical topics with humor and approachability. Heartcore Records has also allowed Rosenwinkel to flourish in another dimension of his ever-evolving musical practice as a record producer of other artists, while still consistently putting out his own music that blazes new pathways in the annals of modern jazz.
Gabriel Michaud
Born in 2003, Gabriel Michaud has received countless awards and won the First Prize, the Audience Award, and the Critics’ Prize of the prestigious TROMP International Percussion Competition Eindhoven in 2022, as well as the second prize of the Luxemburg International Competition with his ‘Trio Fragments’. He gets involved in jazz practice too, notably performing with the trio Tryptyk and the ODC Quintet in Nantes between 2017 and 2020. He joined the Haute école de musique in Geneva in 2020, graduating with a Bachelor’s in classical percussions with first class honours. Gabriel obtained a master’s degree at Conservatoire National Supérieur de Paris.
Gabriel has had numerous opportunities to perform on international stages, such as the Philharmonie de Paris, Shangai Opera House, Eindhoven Musikgebouw, Victoria Hall, La Folle Journée de Nantes, and La Folle Journée de Tokyo. In 2024, he is to make his debut as a soloist with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Jonathan Nott.
An all-round musician with eclectic influences, Gabriel is also a composer, writing for chamber music groups and producing electronic music too within the rap-music collective ‘Codex Dissident’.
