Un Monde nouveau

Pépin wrote Un Monde nouveau (A New World) in 2024 on commission for the National Orchestra of the Île-de-France, Paris, and was premiered by l’Orchestre Victor Hugo under Jean-François Verdier’s direction for the opening of the Besançon International Music Festival on September 13, 2024. First BSO performance/American premiere: August 10, 2025, Samy Rachid conducting, in the Koussevitzky Music Shed.

The Amiens-born French composer Camille Pépin, at 34 years old, is at the forefront of orchestral composers in France. She has written for many of the country’s important orchestras, and her reputation has expanded throughout Europe and to the U.S. and Australia. She has been composer in residence with the Orchestre de Picardie and for the International Music Festival of Besançon. Her music has been performed by such orchestras as the Radio France Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Symphony, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and many others, and she has worked extensively with such major conductors as Elim Chan, Alain Altinoglu, Sakari Oramo, Kent Nagano, and Simone Young.

Camille Pépin’s orchestral music displays a lively sonic imagination and at times an almost cinematic sweep and drama as well as a tangible sense of physicality and movement. That physicality may have been instilled in the composer’s musical core when, as a child, she started dance classes and, she has related, became fascinated with the pianist for the class. She began piano lessons herself at age 6, and soon wanted to write her own music, eventually composing her first piece in a music theory class at age 13. The piano, as a vehicle for improvisation and engagement, remains an important tool in her process. Her work is often inspired by her emotional responses to the beauty of visual art and of the natural world, analogizing in her music the textures and colors found in paintings. Her works in response to the natural world, which include Un Monde nouveau, frequently entail narratives that reflect real-world issues and phenomena.

Un Monde nouveau is the second in her “Climatic trilogy” of orchestral works that began with Inlandsis (“Inland Ice”), an “icy orchestral fresco” Pépin wrote on commission for Radio France, that was premiered in 2023 by the Radio France Philharmonic under Mikko Franck’s direction. As the composer relates below, Inlandsis evokes the Antarctic’s melting polar cap. She wrote Un Monde nouveau as its optimistic counterpart, working on commission for the Orchestre de l’Île-de-France. The third work in the trilogy is the flute concerto Ce que raconte de vent… (What the Wind Says), which was premiered December 31, 2024. In addition to all being related to aspects of climate change, all three works share musical material.

As the composer writes below, the musical substance of Un Monde nouveau is derived from the second movement of the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, From the New World, which the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed this past Friday. She uses these small motifs to build sustained, evolving textures, set off in contrasting episodes in this short but dramatic, single-movement piece.

The composer’s comments on Un Monde nouveau appear below.

ROBERT KIRZINGER

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.

Camille Pépin on her Un Monde nouveau

Un Monde nouveau for orchestra, dedicated to the Orchestre national d’Île-de-France, echoes Inlandsis, a previous work inspired by the melting of sea ice in the Antarctic and the resulting global environmental concerns. Un Monde nouveau stands for the revival of our planet Earth, the emergence of a new world regenerating from the old one.

Throughout the piece, melodic motifs revivify the sonic essence as orchestral textures undergo progressive transformations. Motifs overlap and combine, evolving up to a luminous final tutti filled with hope, figuring the revival of a world everybody believed was lost. The slow introduction features two seminal motifs: a minor third, ascending then descending, present in every instrumental section, and the nostalgic melody of the solo cello—inspired by the second movement of Dvořák’s New World Symphony. The combination of ethereal harmonics in the strings and hazy woodwinds create a fluid, liquid, vaporous texture, evocative of what would remain once ice had melted.

Emerging from this fluid texture, a pulsating line in the violin section marks the beginning of a more rhythmic episode. The clarinets introduce the characteristic minor third over flowing flutes and low, rumbling contrabasses. Picking up the motif, the woodwinds develop a new idea and pass it on to the oboes while the sound of the strings gets fuller as the new, now much richer motif (inspired by another theme of the slow movement of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony) pervades first the cello, then the violin sections. The round, warm sound of the brass (the essential core of the orchestra) fills the space. The timpani add their percussive punch to the whole. All elements flare up together in an ascending movement towards a first tutti in which horns and violins state the various motifs—now brighter and more lyrical in the higher register, drawing on all previous sound textures, as it were.

The sound palette reverts suddenly to softer colors. All known melodic elements appear in turn in one or the other section. The woodwinds sound more cheerful and the sound textures are dryer than before (with woodwinds playing staccato, strings pizzicato, and muted timpani). This more festive, dancelike episode leads to a final tutti, a celebration of a new, revitalized world building on what is left after the collapse: a world coming back to life, heralding the dawn of a new era, full of promises.

CAMILLE PÉPIN (translated by Geneviève Bégou)