Stéphane Denève

Stéphane Denève is a French conductor and music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, known for vivid, detail-rich performances of French and orchestral showpiece repertoire. He appears here leading both a large outdoor pops-style program at Forest Park and a concert built around Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, showing his range across popular favorites and core symphonic repertoire.

Denève has a reputation for drawing out orchestral color, the individual shades and textures an orchestra can produce, especially in French repertoire like Respighi's Pines of Rome, where he tends to let the brass and woodwinds bloom fully rather than holding back for balance's sake. In Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, expect a performance attentive to the work's storytelling, birdsong in the woodwinds, the gathering tension of a storm, a sense of scenes unfolding rather than abstract argument. On the Forest Park program, listeners can expect a broad, crowd-pleasing sweep, patriotic marches, film music from John Williams's Star Wars scores, and Carmina Burana's famous hammering chorus, all delivered with the same attention to color and pacing he brings to weightier repertoire.