Mathis Picard

Mathis Picard is a French Malagasy pianist, composer and bandleader based in New York who moves fluidly between jazz and classical music. Trained from early childhood and later at the Juilliard School, he leads his own trio and a larger ensemble called The Sound Orchestra. With the Orlando Philharmonic he takes on Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, a piece written to blur the same line between jazz and the concert hall that defines his own career.

Rhapsody in Blue opens with a famous rising clarinet slide before handing the piano a string of blues-inflected melodies and syncopated, improvisatory-sounding runs, though nearly all of it is written out note for note. Picard's own musical life, playing jazz clubs and concert stages in the same week, suits a piece Gershwin wrote for a dance-band pianist rather than a classical virtuoso. Expect him to lean into the swing feel of the syncopated passages and to treat the famous slow middle tune with a singer's sense of phrasing rather than a strictly metronomic one. The rest of the program pairs Rhapsody with Stravinsky's Petrushka, Ellington's New World A-Comin' and Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, pieces that also borrow from jazz and popular music.

Picard began playing piano at age three and started formal training at four in Pittsburgh, continuing at the Pittsburgh Suzuki Academy, the Conservatoire of Fontainebleau in France, the Centre de Musique Didier Lockwood, and Chetham's School of Music in Manchester, England. He later studied at the Juilliard School. He has performed and recorded with musicians including Ron Carter, Wynton Marsalis and Christian McBride, and leads both a trio and a larger ensemble called The Sound Orchestra. He is a Juilliard alumnus, an ASCAP Next Generation of Songwriters recipient, and a member of the Montreux Jazz Foundation.