Edgar Moreau

Cellist Edgar Moreau began performing concertos with world-class orchestras while still in his teens, releasing his first recital album at age 20. He has been called "Le Petit Prince" of the cello, and he has certainly notched prestigious accomplishments at a very young age, taking the second prize in the Tchaikovsky competition at 17, among other honors. Moreau has gone on to a successful career in adulthood, and he has become a fixture in the stable of artists associated with France's Erato label. On that label, he issued the album Rococo in 2024. Moreau was born on April 3, 1994, in Paris. He took up the cello at age four after seeing a girl receiving a cello lesson in an antique shop. He also studied piano and won a French conservatory prize on that instrument in 2010. However, the urge toward the cello was stronger, and by the time Moreau was 11, he was giving concerts with major youth orchestras, the Simón Bolívar Orchestra in Venezuela among them. At 13, he enrolled at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, where his teachers were Philippe Muller in cello and Claire Désert in chamber music. A major breakthrough toward national recognition was the Young Soloist Prize at the Rostropovich Cello Competition in Paris in 2009, when Moreau was 15. The Tchaikovsky win followed two years later, and that validated the raves that were coming from music writers who had heard Moreau play, like the Bachtrack editor who noted his "bags of stage presence, with a flexible face which can turn from smile to grimace and back in an instant but always shows deep involvement with the music" (as quoted by the Warner Classics website, accessed January 20, 2021). Moreau was signed to the Erato label in 2013, a year that also saw him named the "Révélation" of the year at the Les Victoires de la Musique awards. His 2014 debut on Erato, Play, was a collection of encores and other short pieces recorded with pianist Pierre-Yves Hodique. Its follow-up, Giovincello, offered little-known Italian cello concerto repertory of the 18th century, recorded with the historical-instrument ensemble Il Pomo d'Oro (an unusual move for a rising young instrumentalist). The year 2015 also saw Moreau perform the Sarabande from Bach's Suite No. 2 for solo cello, BWV 1008, at a concert marking the terrorist attack of November 13, 2015, in Paris. Moreau collaborated with top-rank French instrumentalists on a 2017 survey of Debussy's sonatas and chamber music on Erato, and in 2018, he and pianist David Kadouch returned with an album of chamber music by French composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: not just the common Poulenc and Franck, but also Rita Strohl and Fernand de la Tombelle. In 2019, he issued an Erato album devoted to cello concertos by Jacques Offenbach and Friedrich Gulda, with the orchestra Les Forces Majeures, and he returned the following year with A Family Affair, a recital album featuring his siblings Raphaëlle, Jérémie, and David Moreau. By the early 2020s, Moreau had emerged strongly as a cellist with not only a muscular style and considerable charisma but also a strong sense of programming originality. He has released albums almost annually. In 2022, he joined the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester and conductor Michael Sanderling for Transmission: Korngold, Bruch, Ravel, while a 2023 album of cello concertos by Mieczysław Weinberg and Henri Dutilleux featured the WDR Sinfonieorchester in Cologne. Moreau returned to the Luzerner Sinfonieorchester for his 2024 recital Rococo, which included performances of Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme, Op. 33, and Chopin's Cello Sonata, Op. 65. ~ James Manheim, Rovi